Recaps

  • Five Year Recap

    Five Year Birthday CandleFive years ago I started a review site, a Blogspot to be specific. I played some games, wrote a lot, and some people read it. After a year, I moved away from the Blogger platform to my own domain built on Drupal. I enjoy having control over all aspects of the site, but nothing beats writing about video games. Others started writing too: a few friends and some curious strangers who later became great friends. I've poured countless hours into First Hour, and it's been worth every minute.

    Most of the effort has gone directly into first hour reviews, 240 of them total. 10 days, 240 hours, 14,400 minutes, 864,000 seconds. That's a lot of gaming, and here's the complete list. Enjoy.

  • Day Nine Recap

    Bastion CoverWelcome to the completely pointless recap of First Hour's Day Nine! What are these? Well, simply links to the last 24 first hour reviews for your reading pleasure. Why are they pointless? Well, they're not completely pointless, but we've actually got a lot of content in the pipe and having to put this together feels like a pain.

    Anyways, we've finished up another 24 hours of gaming, which actually is quite a bit. A person can do a lot in 24 hours if they put their mind to it, and most of us would probably put our minds toward gaming, at least I would. Not 24 different games, that would be insane and overwhelming, but when spread across a few months, it's definitely doable.

    So the games: we've got console games, PC games, portable games, blockbusters, indie titles, old games, and new games. Minecraft, Magicka, and MotoHeroz. A double dipping of Captain America and Bionic Commando. One of the things I love about writing for this site is just the sheer variety of stuff we cover.

    Here's the list, and see you in Day Ten!

  • Day Eight Recap

    Enslaved Odyssey to the West CoverI haven't been keeping my New Years Resolution of writing more first hour reviews very well, it took us seven months to get through day eight! Not a very good pace, in my opinion. I've been slacking quite a bit as of late, but Nate has been stepping it up with some excellent first hour reviews accompanied by some well edited videos.

    So here's the latest 24 hours of gaming, we've now produced as many first hour reviews as there are episodes of the TV show 24, which means absolutely nothing, but it's a fun fact you can tell your friends.

    As for the games? The great thing about playing just the first hour is that you really get to try out a variety of games. Everything from the 18 year old Illusion of Gaia to the recent blockbuster Portal 2. Genres cover Wii shovelware to gun porn to time traveling RPGs, we've got it all.

    I completed my goal of beating Mass Effect 2 for the second time and completing Dragon Age: Origins earlier this year, and I've been giving my Steam backlog a lot of attention, so look for some old school Lucasarts first hours in the near future. Thanks for reading.

  • Day Seven Recap

    Goldeneye 007 wii CoverAfter more than three and a half years, we have finally reached one week's worth of playing the first hour of video games. 168 reviews, 168 hours, seven days, one week. That is a lot of gaming.

    After every "day" we present a quick recap of the last 24 games. Nothing too special, but it's a convenient way to block off a set of reviews. Here are the last 24 reviews that represent the last 24 hours of gaming, presented in published order.

  • Day Six Recap

    Well, this is pretty much the most boring thing we post here at the First Hour, but we all mark time in various ways and this is how we do it. We have just completed day six at the First Hour, meaning we completed another 24 first hour reviews putting our total at 144 hours. Definitely an awesome number and an incredible amount of gaming.

    Anyways, here's the rundown of day six, a great list of games to be sure, and a number of them the writers here went on to finish up. That's a sign of a great first hour!

  • Day Five Recap

    Five full days of first hour gaming have been completed, and talk about a blockbuster 24 hours! We played Modern Warfare 2, Dragon Age: Origins, Mass Effect 2, and BioShock 2 for fans of the latest and greatest, and tried out The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks and Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story to see how Nintendo's latest portable offerings fared. In November, we featured a licensed games month, and played a bunch of first hours of a wide variety of games including Beetle Adventure Racing and Dragon Ball Z: Budokai.

    We also introduced a new feature called Half-Hour handheld, for those portable games where playing for an hour is just too long. TouchMaster 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare: Mobilized have been played so far, with more to come in the future. I decided not to include them in the recap because introducing half-hour increments might get a tad messy.

  • Day Four Recap

    Recap Day Four

    Four full days of first hour gaming have been completed, and from here on out I'm not playing alone. Day four introduced three new writers: Paul Eastwood, Grant, and Mike in Omaha. They all have very different tastes in gaming and all look for something different when starting out a new video game. I've had a great time bringing these guys on board and reading their awesome reviews. It's an honor to provide an outlet for them to write as well as host their reviews (and as always, just toss me an email if you're interested in writing too).

    Day four also means I threw away my older scoring system for first hour reviews. It only took 72 reviews, but a few comments and emails exchanged with other review sites convinced me that the scores were simply too distracting to the games and reviews themselves. If you browse back far enough, you'll find quite a few heated and angry comments about how someone felt I was mistreating their favorite game; however, I didn't just do this to appease these complainers, but to make sure my real feelings were communicated properly about the first hour of a game. So the score out of ten is gone, replaced with even more reading. Hope you don't mind.

  • Day Three Recap

    My third day of gaming is up and I had a great time playing and writing about the games. This was the first set of reviews at this site instead of being hosted on Blogger, and I've learned a whole lot about hosting a site like this (like how your bandwidth will get eaten alive when you have a ton of images and allow hot-linkers). I also played my first overall 10 first hour in Call of Duty 4, not to mention the second, Ocarina of Time. And I had an indie-only game month playing a bunch of non-blockbuster titles made by one or two man teams.

    Day Four's set of 24 games will start soon, but I have a bunch of full reviews to write first. I'm also planning on totally revamping the scoring system for first hour reviews. I've spoken to editors of other review sites and kept a close eye on the various comments scattered around and I feel like things need to change. More on this over the next few weeks though.

  • Day Two Recap

    Forty-eight* games have been reviewed. Forty-eight hours have been played. Two entire days of gaming.

  • Day One Recap

    Twenty-four games have been reviewed. Twenty-four hours have been played. One entire day of gaming.