Good video game websites

Xarpho's Return

Xarpho's Return

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Sep 29, 2022
What are some good video game websites that are worth reading? Not stuff like GameFAQs, but just good sites/blogs to read about and explore. To start off I'll share a few of my favorites (or at least former favorites):

I really enjoyed HardcoreGaming101.net for a while but some of the takes are bad and the redesign is even worse. You can't even see all of the games in one page anymore (and it is an extensive list).

For the Obscuritory, it's really easy to write this one off as the author looks like every California "balding cuck" stereotype and doing a fundraiser for Trans Lifeline isn't confidence-inspiring, but there's a lot of stuff to read here, including on SimRefinery and its backstory, and a host of games, many of which you probably hadn't heard of:
TaskMaker (which could've been something like EarthBound for WRPGs if it wasn't for the Mac-only release), Capitalism (an amazingly complex business simulation, the tutorial is 90 minutes alone), art projects that weren't really appreciated at the time (Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse), strange fangames (Super Mario and the Legacy of the Golden Hammer), or games like PowerBar Extreme Rock Climbing.

Those are the only two I can really think of right now. I'd also talk about the venerable |tsr's nes archive but it seems to have gone down for good, 20 years after it stopped updating. Still, for as outdated as it is, it has some full pages for Famicom Disk System games (despite not being officially discontinued until 2003, information on it in the West was hard to come by, and there are pages for it, from stuff everyone knows (Super Mario Bros. 2 aka "Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels") to the obscure (Nakayama Miho no Tokimeki High School), though sadly that's about the extent for it for full pages...
 
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Unfortunately, all the ones I knew are dead or defunct. eg. Screen Cuisine/Demoman/Living in Oblivion/Concerned died in 2014, but worth looking around if you've never seen it. His review of a JRPG demo is an all time favourite. Unseen64 and The Cutting Room Floor are good if you're into unreleased gaming stuff. Alpha Beta Gamer is good. It's a blog and YouTube channel for Early Access indie games, mostly horror, but is handy for finding interesting indies.

Xarpho's Return said:
I really enjoyed HardcoreGaming101.net for a while but some of the takes are bad and the redesign is even worse. You can't even see all of the games in one page anymore (and it is an extensive list).
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From what I heard the guy went woke long ago. I think he was one of the people who was part of the harassment campaign against the guy who made the Goemon 3 fan translation? I remember people complaining that some of his articles are full of errors he refuses to correct.

There was a YouTube channel with a cringe name like "Do You Liek Vidya Games!" that did the obscure game reviewing thing.
 
Xarpho's Return said:
I really enjoyed HardcoreGaming101.net
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Judge Dredd said:
From what I heard the guy went woke long ago. I think he was one of the people who was part of the harassment campaign against the guy who made the Goemon 3 fan translation? I remember people complaining that some of his articles are full of errors he refuses to correct.
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I'm somewhat familiar with Kurt Kalata, the sites owner (or was?). Used to correspond via email when he used to solely run the Castlevania Dungeon website over 20 years ago.

I kind of liked HG101 for awhile but haven't stuck with it much since maybe 2009.

One thing I noticed is if you're familiar with whatever the subject matter of an article is about, it'd be grossly inaccurate or way too surface level (the KoF and Guilty Gear articles annoyed me).

Another thing that turned me off was when Kurt wrote this lengthy screed about how much he hates Dragon Quest when DQ8 came out. Walls of text shitting on DQ8 and how awful it apparently was to him at the time.

Then suddenly, like that assclown Jeremy Perish who too was dismissive of the series, he started to act some sort of alpha gate keeper to the series and and pretends to be some uber fan since the start because idk.

The article about DQ8 has been scrubbed from the internet but I know you might be able to find a forum post from the time from a DQ fan rebutting all the shit Kurt said.

My theory for this turn was because at the same time HG101 began hosting this cringe post modern dork named Pitchforks giant retrospective from Socks Make People Sexy about each Final Fantasy game that was gettint attention and decided he needed his own type of thing and chose DQ (Kurt or whoever else already did a SMT thing that was pretty bad).

The last time I looked at HG101 was literally the day after Trump got elected. Kurt decided to publish all upcoming articles at once that day because America was doomed and he was all sad and shit.
 
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Judge Dredd said:
Unfortunately, all the ones I knew are dead or defunct. eg. Screen Cuisine/Demoman/Living in Oblivion/Concerned died in 2014, but worth looking around if you've never seen it. His review of a JRPG demo is an all time favourite. Unseen64 and The Cutting Room Floor are good if you're into unreleased gaming stuff. Alpha Beta Gamer is good. It's a blog and YouTube channel for Early Access indie games, mostly horror, but is handy for finding interesting indies.
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I really want text-and-picture pages. In general, video content is a plague. With writing you could be a gravelly troon or a nasally-voiced autist and you can still get the point across. (The whole voice dissonance is where Maddox's decline started.)

Unseen64 and TCRF are interesting, but Unseen64 has an atrocious layout, atrocious navigation, and looks to be largely machine-translated. TCRF is a wiki and while it's better than most it is what it is.

From what I heard the guy went woke long ago.
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I actually remembered wanting to write for HG101 back in the day, and his left-wing shenanigans were one of the reasons I didn't want to work with him, the other reason is he didn't want to communicate with me about my rough draft. (I would've just gotten my work exploited and profited off of anyway). A lot of his own original work (as in, not by people sending stuff) was/is sucking off a lot of SJW indies, complete with the language used by those groups ("[VA-11 Hall-A] was released around the same time as other narrative heavy indie games, and ones that included equally diverse casts and queer characters." or "On the surface, [Night in the Woods] presents itself as a horror story, but it’s much more than that – it’s about dreams, about growing up and moving out, about capitalism and its victims, and about mental illness and the tolls it takes.") Frankly I'm surprised at this rate he hasn't taken the troon pill himself.

TATE MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOODE!! said:
Then suddenly, like that assclown Jeremy Perish who too was dismissive of the series, he started to act some sort of alpha gate keeper to the series and and pretends to be some uber fan since the start because idk.
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Like Yahtzee and Dark Souls? I mean, he didn't hate it at first but the second game he was talking it up like he always loved Dark Souls from day one. There was another series I remember that a similar stunt was pulled.

Overall, I do have to admit that talking about HG101 is motivated a lot on nostalgia, and its erratic updates make it hard to consistently check (their updates page is mixed with their podcast feed updates...you'd think in their big upgrade they'd segregate the two).
 
Xarpho's Return said:
Like Yahtzee and Dark Souls? I mean, he didn't hate it at first but the second game he was talking it up like he always loved Dark Souls from day one. There was another series I remember that a similar stunt was pulled.
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Found the rebuttal to Kurt's DQ8 sperging.

"It was all just a joke bro to troll forum posters!"

I never used HG101's forum so who knows.

Anyways to contribute a good gaming site that's still active, I love me some shmuplations. Place is good for translating old articles for old school arcade games and the like.
 
Xarpho's Return said:
I really want text-and-picture pages. In general, video content is a plague.
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That's why I mentioned Alpha Beta Gamer. The videos are just no-commentary gameplay videos, and the articles are straight to the point and light on opinions.
 
DumbDude43 said:
4chan.org/vg/
(if you can handle the fact that 90% of the catalog is clogged up with anime waifu gachashit lol)
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Avoid /vg/ at all costs. Every thread has been infiltrated by coombrains and trannies, although those aren't mutually exclusive.
 
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TATE MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOODE!! said:
Found the rebuttal to Kurt's DQ8 sperging.

"It was all just a joke bro to troll forum posters!"

I never used HG101's forum so who knows.

Anyways to contribute a good gaming site that's still active, I love me some shmuplations. Place is good for translating old articles for old school arcade games and the like.
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Geez, what a faggot. When you write something that's out of the ordinary that's not an obvious joke (like something on April 1st) and go to bat for it you lose credibility, it's like Lowtax and the mangosteen juice.

Plus, "to piss off a bunch of trolls in a forum I hated" and STILL having hangups about them two and half years later is cringe-worthy.
 
Error Macro wasn't a gaming website, but a handy headlines/news compiler ran by one dude. I really miss it.
 
It's been well over a decade since the site was gutted but I still mourn the loss of Gamesradar's original staff. That stuff will always be gold to me. It would be cringe in today's neo-post-ironic internet, but goofy shit like the Ultimate Character Battles and What If Hitler Smoked Pot and every episode of Talkradar are forever burned into my brain.

All the best sites were ones that went out of their way to make content that was fun in it's own right. Play4Real was the last I saw do it really well but that's been dead for ages. Destructoid became discount Kotaku when Jim Sterling left, so no more bits like his big bullet point list of reasons he hates weebs. The Something Awful articles had some great gaming stuff but I think I'm the only person in the world who knew that side of the site existed. The best you have now is Hard Drive; though even when they aren't an insufferable shitlib soapbox their wit begins and ends in the headline. The consolidated internet really killed that kind of long-form editorial humor off.
 
Judge Dredd said:
That's why I mentioned Alpha Beta Gamer. The videos are just no-commentary gameplay videos, and the articles are straight to the point and light on opinions.
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Blogs are only good enough if they have an easy way to search for older content, which in this case there isn't. Opinions are fine and actually welcomed if you're not going to be an insufferable sperg about current-year politics (HG101), can't go five sentences without typing a swear word, and understand what you're talking about (this last one is why AVGN has always been awful). If you're not going to have a take on anything I could literally just look things up on MobyGames.


TATE MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOODE!! said:
Anyways to contribute a good gaming site that's still active, I love me some shmuplations. Place is good for translating old articles for old school arcade games and the like.
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I checked it out, read a few articles, but it's not quite my cup of tea. It's a useful site, though.
winterfag said:
Vimm's is all you need
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This is exactly what |tsr's nes archive was complaining about nearly a quarter of a century ago.


ThinkThankThunk said:
It's been well over a decade since the site was gutted but I still mourn the loss of Gamesradar's original staff. That stuff will always be gold to me. It would be cringe in today's neo-post-ironic internet, but goofy shit like the Ultimate Character Battles and What If Hitler Smoked Pot and every episode of Talkradar are forever burned into my brain.

All the best sites were ones that went out of their way to make content that was fun in it's own right. Play4Real was the last I saw do it really well but that's been dead for ages. Destructoid became discount Kotaku when Jim Sterling left, so no more bits like his big bullet point list of reasons he hates weebs. The Something Awful articles had some great gaming stuff but I think I'm the only person in the world who knew that side of the site existed. The best you have now is Hard Drive; though even when they aren't an insufferable shitlib soapbox their wit begins and ends in the headline. The consolidated internet really killed that kind of long-form editorial humor off.
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Reminds me of NintendoLand, a website from the early 2000s (already by 2003 they announced they wouldn't update anymore) that did "Death Matches" and fan fiction alongside normal stuff like the history of Nintendo (inaccurate by modern standards) and tech specs. It was also where I learned about the Nintendo SNES CD. I'd like to show it off on Archive.org but it seems to be with some weird code that causes it to try to refresh a few seconds.

I guess I should mention another website that I enjoy(ed) and remarkably still updates, Defunct Games. They still take a look at old video game magazines, like EGM's Quartermann and his ridiculous nonsense, but most of the features I liked...I've Got Your Number, Cover Critic, The Black Sheep, and others, but most of those particular features haven't been updated in years. (Cover Critic was last updated in 2012 with only three new entries in the last decade, for instance).
Judge Dredd said:
Unfortunately, all the ones I knew are dead or defunct. eg. Screen Cuisine/Demoman/Living in Oblivion/Concerned died in 2014, but worth looking around if you've never seen it. His review of a JRPG demo is an all time favourite.
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There doesn't seem to be much when filtering for video game content. Most of it links back to his work on PC Gamer, which is still active.

I've given some thought to subscribing to PC Gamer (it would be nice to get magazines in the mail again) but I'm pretty sure I read some of it years and years ago and thinking how dry it was compared to Nintendo Power. (And of course, Nintendo Power went straight down the tubes when Future US bought it out). The thing about Nintendo Power prior to 2007-2008 or whenever Future US bought it was that the older issues held up 5, 10, 20 years later, and was still fun to look at. I don't think I could say the same about PC Gamer.
 
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