Emily is Away

Release Date: November 20, 2015

Played on: Windows

Emily is Away is an interactive story told though an AOL Instant Messanger avatar. It's about growing up and dealing with the awkward relationships that transition from high-school to college through technology. 

The entire play-through only takes about 30 minutes, but it's enticing to play-through a few times just to see where different dialogue options would go.

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare

Played on: Playstation 4
Release Date: November 4, 2014

I've had a storied history with the Call of Duty franchise.

Call of Duty 3 was the first time I really thought console first person shooters could be a thing. I was amazed at how great the controls felt compared to other console FPSs like the PS1 Doom port or Halo.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was the first time online multiplayer got it's hooks into me. I had 8 clocked days in the multiplayer. I bought every DLC map and generally played for a couple hours each night. This was also the first game I played in high definition.

Call of Duty World at War was the first time I was utterly impressed with how many glitches there were in both the campaign and multiplayer.

I thought the first Black Ops was a boring story wrapped around favorite movie scenes from Apocalypse Now and Hamburger Hill. And Modern Warfare 3 fell short of the expectations coming from MW 1 and 2. I took a few years off of Call of Duty.

Advanced Warfare was bought only because I wanted a couch co-op game to play with a buddy and it was half off that weekend. What I received was a surprisingly fun game.

Resident Evil 0

Played on: Playstation 4
Release Date: January 19, 2016 (November 12, 2002 original)

Resident Evil 0 was always this weird outlyer for me. Resident Evil games sold me on gaming platforms, but as someone going off to college in 2003, I couldn't really afford to have both a Playstation 2 and Gamecube. I chose Playstation.

Much like Code Veronica, I stared at the box art and thumbed through the strategy guides, trying to complete the Resident Evil story in my mind. It wasn't until 2006 when a used game store started selling Gamecubes for $35 a piece that I finally got to play Resident Evil 0.

Most times when I booted up RE 0, I would inevitably stop after 30 minutes and go back to RE-make.

It's been exciting playing, almost like getting a throwback Resident Evil game in 2014.

Tomb Raider Anniversary

Played on: PC
Release Date: June 1, 2007

I had a dream last week where I was exploring an Mayan temple and it gave me a craving for some old style Tomb Raider.

Luckily, during one of the Steam sales a few years ago, I picked up every Tomb Raider game up to the 2013 reboot for roughly $15.

Unluckily, the PS1 ports of those games don't support controllers and are basically unplayable with a keyboard. So I have four PS1 Tomb Raider games in my Steam library that I may never touch.

The original Tomb Raider has a special place in my heart. It was one of the first times I thought, "Videogames will never look more realistic than this."

In 2007 (during the second reboot of the franchise) we got Tomb Raider Anniversary which was a remake of the very first game with some of the additions from Tomb Raider Legends.