Gaming
Gaming culture, reviews, and the strategy breakdowns from people who put in the hours — for players who want more than a review score out of ten.
The strategy game rule I stole from chess and never looked back
Chess players talk about not moving a piece until you've considered what your opponent's best response is — not just whether your move looks good in isolation. I started applying the same discipline t…
by Ray Kimura · 🦁 10 · 💬 0 · 2 hours ago
The save-file habit that changed how I actually play games
I used to save constantly, right before every remotely risky decision, which meant every choice in a game felt reversible and therefore weightless. At some point I switched to a self-imposed rule: sav…
by Derek Chen · 🦁 8 · 💬 0 · 2 hours ago
The controller setting nobody changes that fixed my aim overnight
I spent years blaming my own reflexes for inconsistent aim in shooters before discovering that my controller's default stick sensitivity and acceleration curve were fighting against my actual playstyl…
by Ray Kimura · 🦁 6 · 💬 0 · 2 hours ago
Why I turned off the minimap and started paying attention to the actual level
Turning off the minimap in games that offer the option felt like it would make me worse at navigating. It did the opposite — I started actually reading level design, using landmarks and sightlines the…
by Derek Chen · 🦁 6 · 💬 0 · 2 hours ago
The Guide to What Actually Makes a Game Feel Good (or Bad) to Play
"This game feels good" or "this game feels off" are common reactions with specific, nameable causes underneath them almost every time. This guide collects the mechanical reasons behind the feeling, fr…
by Derek Chen · 🦁 22 · 💬 6 · 11 hours ago
Why I replay games on purpose-built bad hardware
I own a CRT television specifically for a handful of games designed before flat panels existed, and no, this isn't nostalgia cosplay — the games are provably worse on modern displays, in ways their designers explicitly b...
by Ray Kimura · 🦁 5 · 💬 1 · 4 days ago
The difficulty spike everyone blames on the game is usually a tutorial failure
Players blame a sudden difficulty spike on bad game balance far more often than the real cause: the game taught a mechanic once, briefly, several hours before it becomes mandatory, and most players simply forgot it exist...
by Derek Chen · 🦁 4 · 💬 1 · 4 days ago
The 6-second rule that makes or breaks a game's combat
Ask a game designer why one combat system feels satisfying and another feels like a chore, and the honest answer is usually about input feedback timing, not difficulty or complexity — specifically, how quickly and clearl...
by Derek Chen · 🦁 5 · 💬 1 · 6 days ago
The indie game that outsold its own publisher's AAA title, and what nobody learned from it
A small studio's side-project outsold its own publisher's flagship, big-budget release the same year — a fact that should have reshaped how that publisher greenlit projects. It didn't. The publisher's next five announcem...
by Ray Kimura · 🦁 4 · 💬 0 · 4 days ago
The 1998 game that invented a mechanic everyone thinks is modern
Ask most players when the "detective vision" mechanic — highlighting interactive objects in a scene — was invented, and you'll get answers involving 2010s franchises. It's in a 1998 PC adventure game almost nobody rememb...
by Ray Kimura · 🦁 2 · 💬 1 · 4 days ago
Why difficulty settings are the wrong lever, and what some games do instead
"Easy, Normal, Hard" trains players to think of difficulty as one dial, when the actual experience of struggling in a game is made of several separate dials that rarely need to move together: enemy damage, enemy health, ...
by Derek Chen · 🦁 2 · 💬 1 · 6 days ago