ambigamingcorner

[ambigamingcorner]

Games of Our Lives

Like the discs on our backlog, these are Games of Our Lives... Or, one favorite game per year of life. Maybe.

2022 has been rough, my friends. I am diligently committed to not waffling about my personal issues online, but boy has 2022 been rough for me. It perhaps wasn’t the wisest idea to take on a whole entirely different project this year on top of everything, but here we are. At any rate, you didn’t come here to listen to me complain vaguely, you came for video games and psychology! There was…

[ambigamingcorner]

Gateway Games to RPGs: An Adventure of Its Own

It's 420, so let's talk about what games opened the door for our intense love of RPGs! Would you believe us if we said it might have been a song?

I recently stumbled across an article about the questline of our video game adventures over at our friend Gaming Omnivore’s blog. It got me thinking about my own journey toward being an RPG fan, since I wasn’t always. When I jumped into this video game blogging thing, I was so jealous of people who had played games like Knights of the Old Republic and Baldur’s Gate when they came out, and who…

[ambigamingcorner]

Doki Doki Reality Dose: Being Real in a Simulation

Here's a totally real article that exists in our reality, which is real and is in no way a simulation. Probably. #DokiDokiLiteratureClubPlus #DDLC #reality

It’s always a treat when I find a game that grabs my brain and shakes it a little. Let me tell you, when I picked up the free Doki Doki Literature Club I would get much more than a cleverly-disguised horror game. Let me tell you, whatever I was expecting when I picked up the recently-released Doki Doki Literature Club+, it was not that I would walk away wondering if the game was suggesting we…

[ambigamingcorner]

Happy New Year!

An update for 2022!

Hello, my favorite readers of the AmbiGaming blog, and happy new year! 2022 has gotten off to quite a busy start over here in the AmbiGaming castle, and you might have noticed that means things have been a little quiet around here. Don’t worry, I haven’t gone anywhere permanently, but as happens as one gets older, I have been hit with a number of real-life things that have resulted in my video…

[ambigamingcorner]

Reading Into It: The Game, The Girls, The Gamer

What better game to read into than a game about a literature club? We go down the rabbit hole with our first of a series of #DokiDokiLiteratureClub posts. How far down does this rabbit hole go?

It’s finally happened. I have found a game that I have struggled where to even begin analyzing, because so much of the discussions surrounding it hinges upon the person you’re fangirling at talking to having played the game that it’s hard to know where to begin. As we talked about last time, Doki Doki Literature Club (DDLC) is a game about dating in high school, which, if you’re an introvert…

[ambigamingcorner]

High School Dating, the Game: The Interesting Case of Doki Doki Literature Club (spoilers)

AmbiGaming vs. Doki Doki Literature Club, or can we survive high school dating a second time? #games #DDLC #horror #datingsim

Doki Doki Literature Club, developed by indie studio Team Salvato and published on various non-console platforms in 2017, is a game best experienced with as few spoilers as possible. It’s a great game with a fun story, cute girls, and an unexpected twist, and I had to give this post the blandest title ever in order to keep all other details secret. Seriously, if you stopped by to see if this game…

[ambigamingcorner]

If At First You Don't Succeed, Press "Up" Again and Again: The Interesting Impressions of The Last Story

Is Nintendo's The Last Story the Last JRPG I try, or has it made me a convert? #games #review

The Last Story, released in 2011 or 2012, depending on where you live, is a JRPG that was, arguably, the Wii’s last hurrah before we all really and truly switched to the next generation of consoles. If you think the name The Last Story sounds like a clunky translation of Final Fantasy, you’re partly correct! This JRPG was developed by Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of the original Final Fantasy,…

[ambigamingcorner]

This Game Wasn’t Made For You: The Interesting Impressions of Cyberpunk 2077

Just what the internet needs. Someone else complaining about #Cyberpunk2077.... 's dialogue. Buckle up... #games

Buckle in, everyone. This is going to be a doozy. First Impressions Full disclosure, I had no desire to play CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 until the outrage over certain elements in it caught my attention. Without wanting to support a game that was being called a transphobic mess of a game, I requested the game from interlibrary loan, and played about 25 hours of it before it had to be…

[ambigamingcorner]

#MyShepard: Making Mass Effect Yours

#MyShepard Let's get artsy! There's some symbolism hidden in the new #MassEffectLegendaryEdition cover that you might not have seen...

Mass Effect! Fourteen years after the released of the original Mass Effect, and nine years after the release of Mass Effect 3, and of course some years-between after Mass Effect 2, EA and BioWare released a remastered version of the acclaimed Mass Effect trilogy. While I am confident that more Mass Effect posts are coming, especially since some small details have – I’ve heard – been changed from…

[ambigamingcorner]

Lost and Found: The Interesting Case of What GRIS Teaches Us in a Post-COVID-19 World

Can a game about grief help us make sense of our post-COVID-19 world? #Gris #games #grief

I love a good story, I love when media tackle hard topics, and I love when a game uses mechanics to tell its story. For your consideration, I present Gris, the platformer-adventure game developed by the Spanish developer Nomada Studios. It was released in either 2018 or 2019, depending on platform, and won a Games for Impact Award at the 2019 Game Awards. For those of you who’ve been around a…

[ambigamingcorner]

Completely WAU’d: A Case for Life in the Matrix

Revisiting #SOMA and examining the WAU vs. the ARK for assigning meaning to life. #games #philosophy

SOMA is the game that keeps on giving, at least when it comes to questions about humanity and the nature of reality. Prior to this article, we touched upon the idea of consciousness and at what point You 2.0 stops being You and starts being Their Own Person. Within that is the question of whether a digital copy of our analogue brains can really count as being “human,” or whether it is, to quote…

[ambigamingcorner]

The Interesting Case of ABZU: Non-Duality, and Being the Same and Different

#ABZU : Diving for understanding and identity among other #games of its kind

When ABZU, developed by Giant Squid Studios, was released in 2016, I was immediately drawn to it. As a lover of the ocean, as a lover of games like Journey and Flower, I couldn’t wait to jump into another game that provided the same kind of relaxed gameplay that still provided an interested story, conveyed almost entirely through the mechanics. Upon its release, it was compared, often favorably,…

[ambigamingcorner]

Intimacy Issues: Game Lovin'

Share your intimacy issues in games! We have a few of our own... #ValentinesDay #GameSmarter #psychology

It’s almost Valentine’s Day, so that means it’s time for AmbiGaming to analyze the heck out of relationships! We’ve talked about the importance of virtual love and how our virtual relationships define us. And anyone who has been here long enough knows my crusade for defeating gender stereotyping. We’ve talked about love, we’ve talked about stereotypes, we’ve talked about romance. So what’s in my…

[ambigamingcorner]

You 2.0: The Interesting Case of SOMA

#SOMA and existential crisis: perfect together...? #horror #games

Play SOMA, they said. It’s full of interesting existential drama, they said. And wouldn’t you know it, underneath all the goopy blobs of decaying flesh, that is exactly what I found. I Always Feel Like SOMA is Watching Me… Released in 2015, SOMA is a survival horror game developed by Frictional Games, the same folks who brought gamers Amnesia: The Dark Descent, which is another fine horror game…

[ambigamingcorner]

Blood Magic and You: A Dilemma

Happy #DragonAgeDay! Tired of the mage vs. templar conflict? Let's put to rest once and for all whether magic and blood magic are inherently bad. #DragonAge #philosophy #ethics

Happy Dragon Age Day! After an entire Dragon Age Month, full of revisits of games, examinations of favorites, and a slew of thoughts on characters, trophies, and fanatic fans I’ve saved one last heavy-hitting topic for this year’s Dragon Age Day.

Throughout the Dragon Age series, the unease surrounding magical arts has bubbled beneath the surface of all game events, and sometimes has exploded to…

[ambigamingcorner]

Dragon Age Month DLC - Ah, Love

#Love and #DragonAge... You know our Number One, but can you guess our second favorite? #games #DragonAgeMonth

Welcome to Dragon Age Month! I had so much fun with Mass Effect Month, and it’s not a secret I love Dragon Age even more than I love Mass Effect, so this is a match made in the Golden City. Every Monday and Friday of this month we’ll be tackling a different question, so be sure to chime in with your own answers each day this month!

Day Nine: Who is your favorite character to romance?

Sigh.

Okay,…

[ambigamingcorner]

It's Dragon Age Day!

I can't believe it's almost #DragonAgeDay again! Why did I have a whole #DragonAgeMonth? Here's why, in one succinct answer from last year. #BioWare #DragonAge

Happy Dragon Age Day!

I admit, I am rather unhappy that my work schedule didn’t permit me to launch my Dragon Age Month plans to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of Dragon Age: Origins, but never fear, it has been rescheduled for a later date. I promised you would be inundated with Dragon Age posts the same way you were buried in Mass Effect posts, and I intend on making good on my promise.

But…