Scanline Talks

Do you like… my car? Forza Horizon 5 left Jen and Six feeling surprisingly lukewarm, and most of the time that would be the story of racing games for the time being. After all, Need For Speed has been a mess for years, and while Jen likes more serious racing games like DiRT, they’re beyond […]

It’s time for the new monthly Playlist Podcast! I mean, the podcast isn’t new. It’s just that we’re doing it monthly now. Kyrie dove back into The Wolf Among Us, Six tried the newest expansion for Star Wars: The Old Republic, Jen is playing more of the new Sherlock Holmes, and there’s plenty to say […]

Here we are: Best Game, aka Game of the Year. You know what this one’s about. Let’s get into it. The Nominees Are:Hitman 3DeathloopMonster Hunter RiseMetroid DreadMelty Blood Type LuminaResident Evil: VillageNEO The World Ends With YouPsychonauts 2The Forgotten CityRatchet & Clank: Rift ApartGuardians of the GalaxyInscryptionShin Megami Tensei V That’s it! Thank you everyone […]

Whether touching, hilarious, sick af or what have you, games have always been good at creating moments you just have to tell others about. Let’s talk about those moments. The Nominees Are:Taking on Arena fights with friends (Monster Hunter Rise)Turf Wars (Monster Hunter Rise)Monster riding (Monster Hunter Rise)The sense of bewilderment of rankings of pointless […]

Is this where I make a “ya like jazz” joke? That’s Our Jam is our music category, and we want a song that isn’t just good to listen to, it’s also good in game, and just generally a bop. The Nominees Are:Disaster of Passion [May Theme] (Guilty Gear Strive)Trigger [Giovanna Theme] (Guilty Gear Strive)Armor-Clad Faith […]

Remasters. Remakes. Whatever you want to call them, they are here to stay. The PS3/360 generation poked its foot in the door with these, and now they live here. I have pretty mixed feelings about them, to be honest. But definitely some of them are worth celebrating, and we’d like to talk about those. The […]

You could also call this Best Old Game, if you hated being pithy and also wanted to insult these games. But in any year, MOST of the games we play aren’t from that year. They’re from years previous, sometimes many years previous. Of these, which ones defined our 2021? The Nominees Are:Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late […]

The difference between Chinese and Japanese, aka “Riichi” mahjong, is the concept of the Yaku. Basically, it’s a bunch of special forms your hand can take that allow you to call a win, and give you extra points. As a bunch of newbies to the scene, we have strong feelings about which ones are best. […]

There are a lot of bad things about the way technology has allowed games to be changed. Gacha mechanics. Live service hellscapes. Free to play torture. Patching out things that are fun because they’re not what the devs “intended.” But also? There’s DLC, or other add-ons. And sometimes those add-ons really freakin good. Let’s celebrate […]

We’re pretty heavily invested in good writing in games around here. This also leads to a love of a well-written and rendered character. But we’re also kinda queer dopes, so sometimes we just love a handsome boy. Listen, people be containing multitudes. The Nominees Are:Cole (Deathloop)Julianna (Deathloop)Veronica Villensey (Overboard!)Lady Dimitrescu (Resident Evil Village)Nagi Usui (NEO […]

Even when a Gundam show is bad, you often get good model kits out of it. That’s the blessing of this hobby: even when you lose, you can win. Plenty of good Gundam plastic model kits, or gunpla for short, came out this year. Let’s decide the best ones. The Nominees Are:MG Eclipse GundamRG Hi-Nu […]

This is the longest list of nominees for any category, and there’s a reason for that. Around here, we love action and fighting games. And out of all the playstyles created for them this year, which was the best? Let’s see. The Nominees Are: Giovanna (Guilty Gear Strive)Nagoriyuki (Guilty Gear Strive)Goldlewis (Guilty Gear Strive)Happy Chaos […]

As much as we love surprises, it can swing very hard the other way. Sometimes you are all primed to love a game and it just whiffs, hard. It is therapeutic to vent your frustration, anger, and sadness, but at the end of the day, it just sucks to feel like this. These are the […]

Who doesn’t love a good surprise? It’s nice to look forward to games, and have them come out and be everything you want. But what about things you didn’t know you wanted, or didn’t imagine you could ever get? These games are the Best Surprises of 2021. The Nominees Are: Final Fantasy VII The First […]

When you start streaming, you quickly learn that there is a difference between a game that’s good and a game that’s good to stream. Certainly, lots of good games also stream well. But when you try streaming one of your favs and realize it’s no fun to watch, that’s an eye-opening moment. The games on […]

The Nominees Are:Mario Party SuperstarsJackbox Party Pack 8Melty Blood Type LuminaHell Let LooseMahjong SoulPuyo Puyo Tetris 2Mario Golf: Super RushPokemon UniteGundam Battle Operation 2Knockout CityHalo InfiniteFinal Fantasy XIVFinal Fantasy VII The First SoldierForza Horizon 5 One category left for today: Stream Friend, where we talk about the games we streamed in 2021! I hope you’ll […]

Welcome to Scanline Media’s 2021 Gimmick Awards! We’re starting off with a favorite of ours. We’re paid anime critics (every time I say it it’s surreal, but it’s true!), and as you might expect that leads us to having strong opinions on anime. But of all the anime and manga we covered in 2021, what […]

Now we bring things to a close. The curtains fall on the first single player Gundam game in years, with a conclusion that leaves us feeling a little mixed. Without a doubt, Code Fairy as a whole has been a great experience, and a game we’d both recommend. But it doesn’t TOTALLY stick the landing, […]

As it turns out, Volume 2 was so much of a banger that we wanted to make this a three parter after all. Alma’s absence is our gain as this second part starts with a bang, giving us new mission types, new perspectives, and new mobile suits, only to reunite us with the lucky redheaded […]

Jen and Six both have caught the fae fever! In the wake of Volume 1 of the episodic Mobile Suit Gundam Battle Operation Code Fairy, a single player Gundam story about an all-girls squad in the One Year War, the two simply had to convene to talk about. Whether we’ll come back to talk about […]