Roger Ebert once wrote a guide on how to go to the movies where he spoke about how to use input from critics. The best approach, he said, was not necessarily to find a critic whose tastes were in lockstep with your own but to find one whose opinions you could use to judge if you personally would like a movie. His example was a woman who called him up (apparently, the Chicago Sun-Times had dial-a-critic in those days) and asked him what he thought of Ingmar Bergman's Persona. He replied that he found it one of the best films of the year. "Oh, great," said the woman. "That doesn't sound like anything we'd want to see."

In reading GameSpot's description above of Elden Ring's de rigeur completely-unreasonable difficulty level - which can be called only rapturously masochistic, promising ceaseless, limitless agony in every single second of engagement with words that would make a Cenobite proud - I can respond only with an "oh, great" of my own.

Sometimes, it's a pure skill wall. The final level of High Hell requires you to climb a spiral staircase while avoiding a rotating barrage of lasers with precision and timing I'll never eke out of WASD. (Then again, maybe I should give it another try after dozens of hours of Dead by Daylight.) Mighty No. 9, I just couldn't beat the final boss; I got close one time but fell short. I doubt it'd be impossible to triumph eventually, but I just haven't gotten around to it. With a Hard playthrough of Elite Beat Agents; I almost beat the last set of spinners on "Jumpin' Jack Flash," but then my abilities left me. (This is a common experience with the spinners on this game, I hear.)

Happy Easter! You're looking at Epistory: Typing Chronicles, a typing game with a distinctive papercraft look.

You're playing as an amnesiac girl accompanied by a three-tailed fox spirit as she recovers her memories by traveling through a mindscape of metaphorized events from her (modern, real-world) life.

The metaphors are very thin and very college at times, mind you. That's the explanation for the phrases you're seeing on the landscape: internal narration.

I don't recall what's happening here; probably arguing in a Philosophy 101 class.

It is a good game, despite the unsubtlety, combining environmental exploration and satisfyingly intense typing action with lush visuals. This level in particular, with its pinwheels and sunlight and birds and clean white-pastel-sky blue floating springtime palette, stuck with me as a very Easter landscape - which is why you're seeing these images today, a few years after I completed the title. It looks even better in motion, be it through the linked video - or through your own playthrough.

All right, it's time to shake the cobwebs of nightmares & dreamscapes and get down to what matters. Phantasy Star II! That's what matters! A bit ago, I mentioned an article in Game Players magazine that piqued my interest in PS2. On the great repository of archive.org, I found the article.

I don't think this was the magazine I owned; Game Players often repurposed its articles, and I wouldn't have bought a dedicated Genesis publication at a time that I didn't own a Genesis. To my recollection, the magazine I owned was a more generalized end-of-year cross-system roundup. But the magazine above does contain the article, and it deserves a page-by-page appreciation after all these years.