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You Found a Secret Area!

You Found a Secret Area!

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You Found a Secret Area! posts

The Last of Us: Decent blockbuster, terrible game.

I never keep up with the zeitgeist when it comes to anything in media. TV shows, movies, video games, you name it. I’ve come to accept that I will always be behind, looking at stuff years past th...

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Some Stuff I Bought: 2024 (and half of 2025) edition.

So back in October 2024, after covering the stuff I got at the Portland R...

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RTC-3057 for Doom: Doom with a tinge of survival horror.

I. Love. Doom mods. Out of all the things I’ve written about over the years, it’s the one thing I consistentl...

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Quake II RTX: An old FPS gets an unnecessary coat of paint.

There seems to be a lot of hay going around about ray-tracing technology in video games. That stuff where lights reflect off of surfaces that makes it look more like real life. Probably the biggest...

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Shadowgrounds: Survivor: Alien shooting, now with Physics.

Way back in 2016 I wrote about Shadowgrounds, a top-down horror shooter by Frozenbyte, the developers of...

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Mad Max (2015): Maybe we do need another hero.

I gotta say, 2025 has been off to a terrible start. What with everything happening in the USA, I decided to try to take my mind off things by well, doing anything that didn’t involve doomscrollin...

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Save Room - Organization Puzzle: A collection of good things on sale, stranger.

I like Resident Evil. Whether it’s the horror aspects of the first few games, or even the goofy action-driven pivot the series took after Resident Evil 5, it’s one of those fr...

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H2H Xmas for Doom: Santa Slayer.

Every time December rolls around, I always feel a compulsion to writer about a Christmas-theme video game. There’s some pretty okay ones, but there’s one that’s always been on mind and have t...

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Legendary: Maybe we shouldn't open Pandora's Box.

I kind of miss the seventh generation of shooters. Sometimes you’d find a game that while not amazing, was at least trying something interesting. Other times you could end up stuck in the sluice ...

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KATU News at 11: November 23, 1999

One of those "why the heck did I record this?" moments.

Then I saw that there were two segments on Who Wants to be a Millionaire (airing on this station since KATU is an ABC affiliate): One o...

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The Version Everybody Knows - A rant about music discovery in the streaming era.

A while back, I was looking for an alternate version of Tommy Tutone’s “867-5309/Jenny” that appeared in Rock B...

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Forza Horizon 2 presents Fast & Furious: It's about family.

The Fast and the Furious franchise is one of many movie franchises I just haven’t really watched. Much like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the various Star Wars and Sta...

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Daikatana: John Romero's "expert FPS."

Sometimes I think a lot about what is defined as "the worst video games of all time." There's a lot of games in that category that I sometimes question if they deserve that distinction. After all, ...

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Wild West Showdown: American Gladiators meets Mad Dog McCree.

Around 1989, a plucky little sports competition show debuted that captured the hearts and minds of Millennials everywhere: American Gladiators, a show where contenders fought against “gl...

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PopStar Guitar: We have Guitar Hero at home.

For several years, it really felt like the mainstream rhythm games of the past, like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, had been thrown to the dustbin of the past. Mostly to be fondl...

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WRATH: Aeon of Ruin: Revisiting an early access boomer shooter.

Have you ever written a critique about something, then come back to it years later to see if it still holds up? I have that feeling with a lot of things I’ve played. Since I try to improve myself...

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Celeste and my frustration with puzzle platformers.

You know, there’s a kind of genre I don’t quite get why people like it: The puzzle platformer. I’ve tried playing some of the ones so highly recommended to me, only to leave with frustration ...

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Avenged Sevenfold's "Free For All" in Fortnite, and a tale about modern crossovers.

You know, for a few years I had no interest in Fortnite. I played it a bit here and there, but mostly thought of it as a thing that wasn’t really for me, that whole building-while-shooti...

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Some Stuff I Bought: The Rest of 2023 edition.

Well, 2023 is almost over. It’s been a tough time around in my neck of the woods, which has affected me writing any substantial articles, and I apologize for this. I’ll try to get back into the...

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Mountain Dew Game Fuel: The triumphant comeback edition

I never thought I’d ever come back to this again. The last article I ever wrote about video game food and drink was 2016, covering the previous iteration of this specific drink. I mostly left the...

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Blood of the Werewolf: The hunt for a good werewolf game.

(an updated version of this article is available here: https:/...

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Avicii Invector: A rhythm game tribute to an electronic musician.

(content warning: mention of suicide.)

My tastes in music are… rather eclectic. If you’ve ever been a longtime reader of the site, you’ve probably had me write...

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Slingo Mystery: Who's Gold? - A casual classic meets the modern casual game.

In the many years I’ve been writing about oddball video gaming stuff, I thought I covered it all. The unofficial expansion packs, the weird cross-promotions, the mostly forgotten cheap games that...

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Total Overdose: Gringo Theft Auto - Mex Payne.

(An updated version of this is available here: https://asecretarea.com/2023/06/26/total-overdose-pc/)<...

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Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit: Cutesy and gorey.

(An updated version of this is available here: https://asecretarea.com/202...

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Who Wants to be a Millionaire: The Album - One of the strangest soundtracks I've seen.

(an updated version of this article is available here: h...

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BlackOPS for Half-Life: Fun little mod, hard to find name.

You know what I haven't covered in a while? A game mod. How about a game mod for Half-Life, one of my favorite games of all time? Sounds good.

I've always been fascinated by Half...

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Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune on the Nintendo 64: GameTek's last hurrah

(As always, any feedback is appreciated!)

Game show video games are fascinating to me. If you’ve been a follower of my work, you’ve probably read a few pieces on me talking about...

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I Am Alive: Ubisoft's store-brand knockoff of a survival action game.

I never really cared for post-apocalyptic stuff. That stereotypical dystopia of derelict cities fighting off some zombie horde or devastating dust storm while people living in squalor... It all fel...

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FOX n FORESTS: A retro-style platformer with a surprising twist.

About 10 years ago on another Wordpress blog I had, I made a rather dumb, wordy rant about retro pixel-style games sucked and how I was getting sick of them appearing everywhere. This was before ga...

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