Castlevania: Lords of Shadow is my favorite Castlevania game of all time. Yes, I know, blasphemy! But keep in mind that I have always preferred 3-D over 2-D gaming, and that Castlevania 64, despite all its flaws, has been the Castlevania game that I have played the most. Castlevania is a series that never quite got…
Throwback Bit Thursday
Throwback Bit Thursday is a weekly Thursday feature on Never Ending Realm. Read all of NER’s #TBT articles here!
Throwback Bit Thursday: The Lunar 3 Dream Ends
The dream is over…for Lunar fans who awaited a 3rd entry in the beloved 16-bit era series which earned worldwide renown when it was ported to the PlayStation in the late 1990s. Sean Lowe, the man behind the efforts to revitalize the series received (reportedly) a message from Game Arts earlier this month confirming that…
Throwback Bit Thursday: Paper Mario
While the Nintendo 64 is my favorite console of all time, I would be doing myself and our readers a disservice if I told them that Paper Mario was my favorite N64 game. Heck, it wasn’t even my favorite RPG on the system. While critics raved about Paper Mario 22 years ago, I never found…
Throwback Bit Thursday: Final Fantasy VII – The Game That Changed Fortunes
This week, Final Fantasy VII turned 25 years old (Japanese release), and it seems like the perfect moment to think back and reflect on how big a game it was for both the Japanese Role-Playing genre and the PlayStation’s emergence as the dominant home console player in the mid to late 1990s. Squaresoft Never…
Throwback Bit Thursday: The Last of Us
The PlayStation 3 was an interesting machine, to say the least. It was a tech marvel when it first launched back in 2006 as it featured Blue-Ray playback right out of the box and a “cell” CPU that was, at least on paper, state of the art. However, the system’s performance in actual game…
Throwback Bit Thursday: Dark Souls
Before anyone complains about Dark Souls not being ‘Throwback” material, know that it has been more than 10 years since Dark Souls was first unleashed upon the gaming world, and that it was released two console generations ago on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. What made me consider the game for today’s weekly section…
Throwback Bit Thursday: The Day My Beloved PS2 Killed My Beloved Dreamcast
Console generations come and go. Every new generation brings forth a feeling of excitement and anticipation that is hard to describe in words. Bigger, prettier, smarter, and better games are expected with each subsequent leap in technology. In the year 2000, I welcomed with open arms the PlayStation 2 as a replacement to my old…
Throwback Bit Thursday: Gears of War
The Xbox 360, Red Ring of Death issues aside, continues to be Microsoft’s most successful home console of all time. It had a much better start than the PlayStation 3 (commercially, and in terms of software quality), and it ended up selling 84 million consoles to PlayStation 3’s 87 million. For all intents and purposes,…
Throwback Bit Thursday: John Madden Football Games
I know what you are thinking…we never really cover sports games on this site; however, with John Madden’s passing on Tuesday at age 85 and after decades of successful Madden games, we are compelled to take a look back at Madden’s impact on gaming. Furthermore, the impact on me as a gamer. John Madden Beyond…
Throwback Bit Thursday: Perfect Dark
Nintendo’s 64-bit console was a great system, despite its failure to maintain Nintendo’s dominance of the home console market. The system, hampered by its chosen format for media (cartridges as opposed to CDs), featured some of, if not, the most revolutionary games of all time. The N64 was home to the greatest first person shooters…