Opinion

Bob’s Dungeon Maker Rant; Or: Mr. Blandings Builds His Grind House

I’m not usually the type to get excited over anything. Even when pursuing my passions I tend to approach things with a kind of intellectual calm, a distance brought on by refusing to give in to the cascades of immediate emotional reaction in favor of a studied, logical and analytical meditation. I’ve done my best to relax this impulse in my Dispatches, and was probably most successful at it while evaluating God of War, partly because my experience was already so varied between the highs and lows of the game’s successful and problematic qualities that I didn’t feel unafraid to register unabashed satisfaction or, more often, displeasure with what I was experiencing. For games I’ve almost completely enjoyed (you know what they are) I’ve had force myself to restrain my enthusiasm, if for no other reason than I don’t like appearing biased. Obviously, there’s a delicate kind of irony there– if you’re talking about your favorite game/film/book, etc., you are necessarily going to be exercising the very definition of favoritism– but I remain firm in my belief that, for the most part, it’s been best possible way to write for this blog.

Every once in a while, however, you encounter a title that forces you to reevaluate your positions and provokes you to consider more than what is merely thought provoking, emotionally moving or instinctively stimulating, and instead focus on what is just plain fun. Ape brains and lizard brains can’t help you figure out anything at a time like this. The only kind of gray matter that matters is your own, and the scrutiny of everyone else’s opinions be damned– if you’ve just got to say it, you’ve just got to say it:

Taito’s Dungeon Maker is the best goddamn game I’ve played for the PSP, and anyone out there who owns this system and hasn’t picked this title up should be goddamn ashamed of themselves.

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