Sam Martinelli

Happy (almost) New Year! To get the festivities started, here are my favorite games of 2019 (including a few standouts from years past).

For those of us who love, play, and appreciate video games, the end of the year is especially exciting because everyone gets to give us their Game of the Year lists. But why do we do these lists? Why do we care? Why should anyone? For this edition of Punished Chat, I spoke with this very site’s David Silbert about how we approach making our own lists, what we value, and why they exist at all.

From a game design perspective, God of War (2018) knocks it out of the park. Yet while the elements that make up its story are touching, the way the emotional story beats hit the player largely contradicts the actual gameplay of the experience. The end result? The whole game feels worse than the sum of its parts.

I have some strident political views; they’re always evolving, but they’re never muted. In Obsidian’s The Outer Worlds, I’ve been challenged to re-evaluate some of those views, and in interesting ways.

Welcome to the latest edition of Punished Notes! In this piece, I cover the intriguing universe of The Outer Worlds, the familiar but phenomenal Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair, Death Stranding, and more. Also, a few words on a recent Netflix film you ought to watch.

Last year, I decried the overuse of gaming terms like “metroidvania,” as often such words and phrases do little to actually describe the experience any game presents. While I understand why someone might lean on a certain vernacular when describing various works, the time has come for us to rethink how we talk about games in order to describe them in a more accurate manner. I’m not calling for the obliteration of such terms, either; I just believe we should know what we’re saying when utilizing these words.

Here are five particularly notable examples.

Welcome to the latest Punished Notes, a series of my always-evolving and rarely consistent thoughts on the video game world. For this latest edition, I get into how Gears 5 criticizes military superpowers, the lovely remake of Link’s Awakening, and the annual joy of pumpkin-flavored stuff (happy fall)!

Welcome back to Punished Chat. In this edition, I spoke with The Punished Backlog founder David Silbert to discuss the difficulties trying to manage our gaming backlog, how writing about games has changed how we play and what we play, and how there are too many damn RPGs we’ll never finish.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order, Team Ninja’s latest crack at the long-dormant Ultimate Alliance series, is far from a perfect game. Still, the game as a whole just works, and not merely in the sense that its mechanics and systems function as intended; everything comes together conceptually, with the tone of the story and art style perfectly matching the chaotic ebullience of the gameplay. The game combines basic brawler systems with a cartoonish presentation and doesn’t try to be much more than that. Simply put, the game knows what it is and stays true to itself at all times.

Welcome back to Punished Notes, where I (occasionally) release all of my blandest and most anodyne takes on the world of video games. This week, we’ll be looking at some of my favorite user-created stages in Super Mario Maker 2, why I can’t get into a recent game everyone adores, and how I got emotional over a movie trailer after three seconds.