Matt Fox (4)

I think this is one of my favorite books I've received for review. I end up with a lot of stinkers, but this book is pure joy for me. For a videogame nerd, this is an outstanding reference work. I can easily open it up to a random page and lose myself in memories by reading the brief description of one of my favorite games. I find lots of reviews by Fox that I disagree with, but that is all part of the fun. Unlike a fan-contributed sites like MobyGames, which is probably more comprehensive, show more every review here is the work of one mind, with a particular and interesting point of view. You just don't get as much out of a collection of disparate reviews. Even if there is some kind of wiki-style crowd-editing process, it cannot produce a work as interesting as this one.

The book is primarily composed of short reviews of videogames. The middle of the book contains color images of the best and most popular games. There are several appendices listing other interesting information: a chronology of videogames including many not reviewed in this volume, a capsule history of consoles, a listing of prominent videogame designers, and a glossary. This is the best one-volume videogame reference work I have ever seen. It is also the only one-volume videogame reference work I have ever seen. Don't let that deter you, this is a fine work.

The most complete and comprehensive history of consoles that I know of is Phoenix: The Fall & Rise of Videogames by Leonard Herman. This work focuses on the games themselves. The sheer quantity of games the author has played staggers my mind. I thought I played a lot! What really impresses is the overall quality of the work. Sure, you can find a mistake here and there, but there are hundreds of reviews, and I appreciate the yeoman's work done here to collate all this information into one handy volume. I know I'll be leafing through this often. show less

Now here's a guy who understands video games; someone who gets it. I don't agree with every review of Fox's, but it's evident that he's done his homework. And you'll certainly discover that he left out some childhood favorite of yours, but trust me, for every beloved title not included, there are three more you've never heard of and should look up.

A superior gaming experience is more than just flashy graphics or intuitive gameplay or a compelling story. It's about immersion. All great video show more games, like great works of art, succeed at drawing you into a unique other-world where the experience is so compelling that you stick around to find out what happens next.

Thanks to The Video Games guide I now have a list of classics that I intend to go back and play myself someday. show less

I was interested in this book because I wanted a source to help me discover new-to-me games after getting into video games later in life than most gamers. I feel that the first thing to do when handed a book of reviews is to look up reviews of things you're familiar with to see how your opinions line up with the reviewer's. Which is when I realized I would not be able to use this guide the way I had hoped: I mostly play JRPGs and handheld games, the former of which does not seem to be Mr. show more Fox's preferred genre and the latter of which is not included at all. (To be fair, the reviews in this book represent a massive time sink, so the exclusion of handheld games is probably a matter of Mr. Fox needing to draw the line somewhere.)

I looked up Chrono Trigger (arguably responsible for the popularity of JRPGs in the US along with Final Fantasy VII), not there. Earthbound or the Mother series, nope. Secret of Mana, nope. Star Ocean or Phantasy Star, nope and nope. And then I thought, "Surely he had to have reviewed Final Fantasy? You *can't* do something like this and not include Final Fantasy, right?" And I was correct: there is a Final Fantasy review. There is exactly one Final Fantasy review, and it's for Final Fantasy VII.

There are three different reviews for various Grand Theft Auto games.

I know that with an undertaking like this, it's impossible to review every video game ever or even one game from every series ever. I was just disappointed that Mr. Fox's biases are the opposite of my biases, making this book less useful for me personally.

Having said that, once I finally started looking up games that both I and Mr. Fox had played, I found his reviews to be fair, interesting, and unpretentious. I was especially delighted by his review of Gunstar Heroes, one of the very few games I played as a kid. I do wish that there was an alphabetical list somewhere in the back of all the games reviewed for easy scanning rather than flipping to the relevant section and seeing if the game I'm looking up is there or not. And it would also help in finding games in a series when the titles don't all start the same way. (For example, one of the first games I looked up was Katamari Damacy, which is not present. If you want to see Mr. Fox's opinion on the Katamari series, you have to go under "W" for We ♥ Katamari.) show less

This book consists of the author's reviews of video games ranging from 1962's Spacewar (the first video game ever) to a few released in 2012. In intent, it seems to want to be both a history of video games and a guide to what is and isn't worth playing. While the result isn't badly written (despite some significant flaws), I wound up feeling that it failed either purpose. Some of this is due to limits in the author's experience, some is due to his preferences (or apparent preferences), and show more some is due to the two goals occasionally being in conflict with each other.

Because the author is paying for games on his own, there is an understandable bias towards genres that he prefers. For example, there are several relatively obscure first-person shooters with nothing particularly noteworthy about them throughout the guide, but only two Japanese role-playing games, both of them very significant ones (DragonQuest and Final Fantasy VII). Similarly, the fact that he's British affects what he has easy access to, resulting in such details as a disproportionately high number of games for Spectrum computers, almost every team sports game being soccer (except for two American football and one ice hockey that I remember), and some omissions due to games not being released in Europe (specifically mentioned as the reason he reviewed We Love Katamari instead of its predecessor Katamari Damacy). To his credit, he has made the effort to play games of historical significance (such as Spacewar) in preparation for this book. However, there are still several games that only fit with one goal or the other of the book, if that. A game like Spacewar, for example, is historically significant but not something that's easily found to play, while something like Binary Domain (from 2012) may be easily obtained but is unlikely to be important in a historical context, and some of the more obscure games that were never ported to a more recent system (Artillery Duel for the Atari 2600, say) only really fit into the category of "games the author has played."

In addition to the above-mentioned problem of historical importance versus easy availability, the two goals produce conflicts on issues as fundamental as organization. For a review guide, organizing alphabetically by title is preferable, while a history is better served with games in roughly chronological order with an index. This book takes the former approach, which renders it not particularly useful as a history, although reviews such as Spacewar's seem to feel otherwise and one appendix is a chronology that sorts games mentioned in the book by year. Some series of games would have been better served by grouping them together, though, as alphabetical order results in games showing up out of order while assuming you read them in the order the games came out.

One significant issue that pervades the book and hinders it as both a guide and a history is the author's almost complete omission of portable gaming. Not a single game specifically for a portable system or device is reviewed, even highly popular ones like Pokemon or Angry Birds. Only one game for such a system (the PSP reboot of Alien Syndrome) is even mentioned by name, although there are frequent mentions of games having had handheld sequels; this reaches extremely silly levels with series like Lumines or Wario Ware, which originated on handheld systems but only have console versions mentioned by name. As a final indicator of this ignoring handheld gaming, an appendix with a chronology of systems marks some systems in boldface type as being important due to either historical significance or popularity and discusses them further; no handheld system is marked this way, despite (for example) the Nintendo DS having sold more than any other video game system except the Playstation 2 and having sold more than the Xbox360 and Playstation 3 (both marked as important) combined.

The reviews themselves sometimes have problems. Almost all of the 1-star reviews, several of the 2-star ones, and some of the 3-star ones are remarkably brief, barely telling what type of game it is, much less why the author felt it wasn't a particularly good example of the genre. The ratings also feel a bit arbitrary at times, as the reviews suggest he disliked some 2-star games more than some of the 1-star ones. One review seemed to imply that a game's designers not having a "pedigree" could get a game rated down (by listing this among things that weren't responsible for this game's low rating), raising questions about the value of other game's ratings. Some omissions suggest that he spent little time playing the game in question before reviewing it, such as failing to mention the double ship in the differences between Galaga and Galaxian. Some attempts to work out the popularity of specific games can be downright insulting, such as deciding that the fact that Yar's Revenge (which he hates) is well remembered can only be attributed to the box art. A few decisions as to which game to review are odd, such as skipping over the best-regarded games in the Soul Calibur series or only reviewing the slightly atypical Beatles game from the Rock Band series. Finally, there are a number of minor errors, such as claiming Capcom released separate games named Street Fighter 2: Turbo and Street Fighter 2: Hyper Fighting, that suggest a need for some more proof-reading. show less