Welcome back to the Dead or Alive Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be taking another detour, this time to the 3DS with Dead or Alive: Dimensions. This is a weird little spin-off for a number of reasons: at the time, Team Ninja had worked with Nintendo on Metroid: Other M and they ultimately decided to team up for an early 3DS Dead or Alive project. Given Nintendo and their handhelds’ child-friendly reputation, contrasted with Read More

Welcome back to the Dead or Alive Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’re covering Dead or Alive Paradise. So, confession time: I was originally planning on covering Xtreme 2 next, and would just off-handedly mention Paradise there since it’s basically a trimmed-down port of Xtreme 2. However… I sold my Xbox 360 years ago and it turns out that the current Xbox 360 emulation scene is pretty poor, so I can’t get Xtreme 2 running Read More

Welcome back to the Dead or Alive Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be looking at Dead or Alive 4. This was the first Dead or Alive game following Xtreme Beach Volleyball, and was the first mainline entry to get an M-rating. Was this deserved? And how would the perception of Xtreme alter the series going forward? Read on to find out… Dead or Alive 4 is another entry which only had one release, this Read More

Welcome back to the Dead or Alive Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’re covering the first game in the notorious Dead or Alive spin-off franchise, Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball. What can I say about this game that it doesn’t say for itself? Well, if you were interested in video games at the time this came out, there’s a good chance that this was your first impression of Dead or Alive. I had never Read More

Welcome back to the Dead or Alive Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’re going to be covering the next entry in the series, Dead or Alive 3. Having never owned an Xbox, and not being very good at fighting games, this game was about as far off my radar as could be at the time of its release. However, I’d argue that Dead or Alive 3 represents the franchise at its apex of critical and Read More

Welcome back to the Dead or Alive Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be moving onto the next game in the series, Dead or Alive 2. As I said in the previous entry, the original Dead or Alive was fairly derivative: basically a Virtua Fighter wannabe with marketing that played up the pretty girls in its cast in an effort to stand out. Could Dead or Alive 2 step out of this shadow and make Read More

Dead or Alive has basically become a meme around IC2S. I wouldn’t even count any of these games amongst my top 50 all-time favourites, and I’m not particularly good at fighting games… and yet, there’s something about this series that I always find myself getting drawn to (and no, that “something” isn’t the boobs… well, not exclusively, I swear). Maybe it’s just because I love the movie so much, or maybe it’s because I came Read More

Back in the mid-2000s, I came across a somewhat-famous flowchart which purported to illustrate the hierarchy by which geeks look down on each other: Geeks live in a pecking order. Every geek is going to be hit with a level of societal shame for having interests outside what is considered “normal”. The common response to this is to minimize that shame: “Oh sure, I may be a geek, but at least I’m not as bad Read More

I’ve been with Google Adsense for about 15 years. I started with Youtube, where I had one of my paintball videos get over 14,000 views, and a few others got over 1,000. Then I started IC2S on Blogger and, at one point, my Ang Lee Hulk review somehow ended up as one of the top Google image results for the movie. Sure, I’ve always been a very small fish in a big sea and I Read More

Welcome back to a very special bonus entry in the Resident Evil love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over the original version of Resident Evil 2, dubbed by fans as Resident Evil 1.5. A very rough build of this unfinished game leaked years ago and a group of dedicated fans have stitched it together into a mostly-playable demo. I thought that it could be fascinating to see how this early prototype plays, considering Read More

Welcome back to the Resident Evil love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over the original Resident Evil 3: Nemesis! I’ve got quite a history with this game in particular – I can remember seeing Nemesis on the box art for the game and hearing that he would actively stalk you around the game, and I thought that sounded like the coolest shit ever. It was the first Resident Evil title that I can Read More

Welcome back to the Resident Evil love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over the original Resident Evil 2! Often considered the best of the “classic” era of Resident Evil, its popularity has been overshadowed several times over the years – first by Resident Evil 4, then by the cult reappraisal of REmake, then by the remake of Resident Evil 2 released twenty one years later. Given that REmake 2 was the game that Read More

Welcome back to the Resident Evil love/hate series! Now that we’ve been through all the main entries in the franchise, it’s only appropriate to go back to the beginning with the original PS1 trilogy. Naturally, that means we’re going to start with the original Resident Evil! How does this game hold up 28 years later? Read on to find out… Note: Since I played REmake was Jill, I decided to play as Chris for this Read More

Welcome back to the Resident Evil love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over the third, and final, Survivor game, Resident Evil: Dead Aim! I’ve been pretty up-front with my thoughts on the first two Survivor games – they’re two of the worst games in this entire franchise little to no redeeming qualities between them. For Dead Aim, Capcom looked to shake up the formula a bit to try to finally make a Survivor Read More