gaiden is a blog on video games, art, culture, and philosophy.
It's been an odd few months for me, and my gaming habits have been somewhat awry. Not to say I haven't been playing, quite a bit in fact, but with shifts in the larger direction of my life, I've shifted how I play, too. The biggest change for me has been impulse buying a Miyoo Mini Plus for around £30 - a marvelous decision all around. I've toyed with trying to establish a solid emulation handheld…
I have always been a reader, but as I'm sure many readers know, sometimes we forget to read and go through long periods of reading little or none. Or maybe that's just me. In any case, I am trying to kick my habit back in line again. I like to have a few books on the go at a time, for different moods and places: generally, hardbacks for home, paperbacks out and about, something light for my phone…
1998 | PlayStation | ★★★☆☆ Final Fantasy VIII is an odd beast. Feeling both underbaked and bloated, it takes big swings of ambition that should be praised for the daring, yet I feel it never quite strikes home. Nestled between a pair of games I consider masterpieces, I suppose VIII always had big shoes to fill, and its reputation as a black sheep precedes it. 1 It would be unfair to call it bad,…
I've had The Hanged Man come up for me in a big way recently. I'm not really a spiritual one 1 - yet who am I to deny the pull of an archetype my subconscious relates to? I think it's less the card pulling me to it, more my mind pulling the card to me, recognising myself and the truths one must face. This is not about the revelation - such business is a private realm. It has left me thoughtful,…
The idea of a 'backlog' has some unique stranglehold on video game culture. Sure, one might have a reading pile or a watchlist, but how much does one feel the need to clear it fully, to tick each entry off some insubstantial list before moving on to anything new? I suppose it's far healthier and conducive to actually appreciating things to accept that your experience with them will take as long as…
i. With the closure of Myrient 1 , the gaming community loses one of its most robust and open public archives. Of course, this has caused a stir, some even going so far as to back-up the entire website elsewhere 2 - an admirable effort. Myrient's catalogue of the niche and obscure, at risk of fading further, has been preserved , across a number of Internet Archive pages and the like. This is great…
Life carries on, as does playing. I find peace in fictional worlds, and little else does that better than video games, interactive alternative realities; only theatre comes a scratch close to it in its ability to allow for pure fantasy. Anyway, these are a few short reviews of the games I've cleared over the last two months. Down on average from a strong start in January, but a few here are longer…
I played a lot of Doom in 2025. And plan to play more in 2026. These are notes on my journey. i. Doom A dip into the modding scene led me to ask myself "Why don't I just replay Doom?" - so I did. Every visit back, I find myself sinking deeper. Doom is hypnotic. It holds a purity beyond what many games achieve. Find a shotgun, slaughter every demon you can find, until it is done. The thumping…
Writing perturbs me, quite frankly. Speech is fleeting; words are wind - but writing is a monument. An obelisk of thought outlasting empires. We read Shelley, Tolstoy, Brontë, Shakespeare, Homer, Sappho. We know not the people but by their writing, and others writing of them. Yet we know of their thoughts, their ideas and their fears, by their writing. A direct link across centuries from their…
As 2026 speeds forward like a bus without brakes, writing becomes a focus for me. Something to centralise myself in, a focus for my mind. To grow and expand my ideas, thoughts, experiences. I also play a lot of video games, and I like to review them too. Here's a quick round-up of my thoughts on what I've played so far this year. -- Sonic Colors (2010, Wii) Not bad! Sonic fans waited a decade for…