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Etrian Odyssey’s evolution may have reached uber-game levels.

Having just recently completed Etrian Odyssey III, I wasn’t sure if I had it in me to dive right back into another massive adventure.  I mean, heck, I was a little worn out from all of the grinding I had been doing and wasn’t so sure I wanted to get into that again.  Well, somehow I got sucked back into this mess and am I ever grateful.  Atlus has taken the fourth Etrian Odyssey game through a monstrous evolutionary process to create the best balanced, most addictive, strategically engaging dungeon crawler around.

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Errbody inna arcade get tipsy!

This is a video game site, and you are a video game fan, but sometimes it’s important to look at games that have no video at all. These games appeal to players for the same reasons we pump thousands of dollars into our hobby and can give us great insight into some fundamentals of the latest modern console releases.  Mechanical games are still around, mainly spitting out tickets at Chuck E. Cheese’s, but I want to explore some classics too.  Whenever possible I plan to look at some of these games and discuss how they operate, why they’re fun, and if there’s a way to simulate playing them without too much trouble. 

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When Gamefreak takes a break from Pokémon, we all benefit.

Even though they seldom get the chance to prove it, Gamefreak—famous for making the mainline Pokémon games— can also innovate in genres quite different from their meat and potatoes product.  So, when it was announced that they would be creating a downloadable rhythm game for the 3DS, there was good reason to get excited.  Thanks to the recent release of a demo in the eShop, anyone who wasn’t already psyched up for HarmoKnight can find out why the rest of us are counting the days until its release on March 28^th.

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You bet your bass there are no puns in this article.

Whether you’re a true fisherman, a lapsed amateur, or someone who has never even put worm to hook in your life, fishing games can be a lot of fun – when done well.  After the Wii’s motion controls led to an onslaught of questionable fishing games available at your local Academy Sports & Outdoors, the whole genre got pushed even farther off of the typical gamer’s radar.  This April, one of the great fishing series tries to make a return when Super Black Bass 3D is released on the 3DS, but it’s uncertain if it will capture the classic majesty of the Black Bass series heritage.

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The debate about the existence of Purgatory has been resolved! You can experience it yourself for an affordable 200 DSi Shop Points.

Boy, since jumping in video games is a lot of fun, it’s gotta be really great to play a whole game that lets you just jump, jump, jump all the way to Heaven!  Ducking? Pshhhhh.  Shooting?  Lame.  Variety?  Pass.  All we want is that sweet, sweet jumping!  These and other idiotic statements must have been scrawled down during some malformed focus group of imbeciles when the developers of Ah! Heaven were doing preliminary planning for their amazingly boring platformer.

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