James Cunningham

1 week ago | hardcoregamer.com | James Cunningham

There's a moment once the violence and destruction is over when everything is calm, or at least feels that way if you're looking in from outside rather than from the heart of things, trying to figure out how many appendages are still attached and which bits are distressingly leaky. When the damage is big enough, like to the whole world, that calm may last years as the survivors work on reassembling their lives and something resembling civilization.

1 week ago | hardcoregamer.com | James Cunningham

There are good career decisions and bad ones, but it's safe to say that any job requiring company solvency a century after it starts can best be described as "terrrible" and only goes downhill from there. Still, it's too late now for a lone settler dispatched to a remote solar system to oversee the creation of a homestead for colonists who will never arrive, so the only options are to either accept living out the rest of their days alone or figure out a way back to civilization.

1 week ago | hardcoregamer.com | James Cunningham

It's hard to know which are more popular between real and model trains, although model trains being much more affordable has the edge in direct hands-on experience. The big trains are also significantly less disposable, requiring a very good reason to load up a pile of boxcars with explosives and ram the entire thing full speed into an opponent's base. Apparently there are financial considerations that override "It goes boom real good" and honestly, that just seems wrong.

2 weeks ago | hardcoregamer.com | James Cunningham

For a while there was a glut of games similar to Vampire Survivors, thanks to it being successful beyond anyone's wildest dreams and having the entire genre practically to itself. A few great games managed to poke out of the crush, like Soulstone Survivors and Deep Rock Galatctic: Survivor, while other games borrowed bits and pieces of the Survivors formula to create something new, such as Whisker Squadron: Survivor.

2 weeks ago | hardcoregamer.com | James Cunningham

For thousands of years humans have put in the work to be the top predator on Earth, not realizing how much that makes them a big fish in a small pond. Getting out into the universe and seeing what it has to offer isn't a bad idea at all, but doing it without intense levels of paranoia is a less efficient and more expensive version of taking a graceful dive into a wood chipper.