Chalgyr's Game Room Reaches 15 Years

Celebrating 15 years of our team celebrating gaming with you!

It’s hard to believe I’m writing that above statement fifteen years to the day after I put this post out into the world:

Let’s get this first post out of the way, shall we?

Inspiring stuff, right? I mean, probably not in reality. It was just my effort to get a Blogger (now Blogspot) blog post written before I lost interest (or more likely, lost my nerve to 'put myself out there'). Now, normally we don't post Sunday content, but hey - the date landed where it landed.

November 10^th, 2009 is when I planted that particular flag in the digital world to… well, I’d like to say great fanfare. However, seriously I think my wife was the only one who saw that post at the time. Maybe her aunt. Probably my dad. Tree falling in a forest when no one is there to see it kind of stuff, right?

Then came my first real post – a review for Soulcalibur IVon PlayStation 3.

Again, it was just me writing for an audience of basically me. I decided I just wanted to write my thoughts around games like no one was reading them – because they weren’t. Except a funny thing started to happen. My little blog started to get comments and joined several other similarly themed gaming blogs in a sort of circle of sites where we read each other’s content, supported one another, asked each other questions and frankly – we just helped one another get better.

We started writing guest posts for one another, doing podcasts with one another and in my case, writing reviews for other sites who seemed to value my written words. I learned how to work with PR companies in the background, saw my reviews start to show up on Metacritic through other sites and most importantly – started to meet a lot of others who shared my passion for video gaming and writing about it. This was what benefited CGR the most.

There was a lot of ‘me’ and “I’ in those first few paragraphs, but Chalgyr’s Game Room only started with me – it grew with others who started to join the team. It was a somewhat slow trickle early on, but as more people began to write regularly for the site, a surprising thing started to happen. Not only were we getting more content out, but we were getting more readers as a result. We were also getting more people asking to participate. What had begun as a solo passion project became a site that has seen dozens of people come and go now over the last decade and a half as we have written previews, reviews, random thoughts about gaming and more.

Video gaming has always been at the forefront of things, but we’ve examined so much more than that. The team discussed game music, Games of the Year, board games, music creation software, discussed tabletop roleplaying, gaming hardware and so much more. Our third most popular article ever was one written about Magic: The Gathering back in 2014.

Still, video game reviews have been what became the site’s focus. So much so that when you view our review catalog here, if you scroll down to the bottom of the page past the hundreds of linked reviews, you see we have three more buckets of reviews at the bottom of the page. That’s a lot of words over fifteen years. Quiz time: which review of ours has the most hits ever? TheElder Scrolls V: Skyrim – PC Review. This article went live on April 20, 2012 and has over 33.4 thousand views. 

What has helped make Chalgyr’s Game Room such a special place for me is how I just created a safe space to chat about what I enjoy about gaming and found a lot of others who were already friends or became friends who wanted to do the exact same thing. I don’t over-edit things and try to create a ‘CGR voice’ – because everyone writing here has their own. I don’t want to temper it down; I wanted to see it amplified. Sure, we all have our various typos that get cleaned up, but we’ve never been interested in pushing agendas. We love gaming, we just want to share those experiences with others who also love gaming. We don’t always view things the same way – but that’s fine. It’s expected even.

I want to take a moment to appreciate many of the cool things we've gotten to do on this site. Partnerships with big players in the industry allowed us to write about things (often times getting our hands on the game or product early), and providing us with opportunities we wouldn't have had otherwise. No money is being made by us if you click off to these sites, but when I first spun up that first blog post a decade and a half ago, I never imagined I'd be interacting with the companies that we have associated with since. Whether it was Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro sending us per-release Dungeons & Dragons tabletop supplies, Turtle Beach allowing us to review their headsets, Asmodee working with us on some table top game reviews, or big name publishers such as Microsoft, Koei Tecmo and Capcom to literally hundreds of smaller studies and indie developers that have brought their passions to digital life. It's been fantastic to be part of that journey.

Dex:

Agarest: Generations of War Zero:

Chronicles of Tal-Dun: The Remainder:

We've had our reviews mentioned in accolade videos and images, had developers acknowledge our feedback in implementation of game improvements and graced numerous Steam pages over the years (as seen above). 

It's not all flowers on these reviews, however.  We've had more than our fair share of low scores given out over the years. We of course tend to lean towards games we think we'll enjoy, but since we like talking about gaming in general? We're willing to talk about some of the ones that didn't work for us as well. Heck, most of the time when we do our Games of the Year, we have multiple categories including our Biggest Disappointments. I don't want to dwell on these lower scores, because we generally want to celebrate having fun with gaming. We know a lot of work goes into these titles. But we have had our share of lower scores, such as PlataGo (which scored a 2 with our reviewer). 

Chalgyr's Game Room is about the discourse. Sure, the majority of our articles are reviews, but it would be remiss of me not to bring up our Retro Reviews, Memorable Music, Jaggy's Corner, Gaming Thoughts, loads of News posts and so much more. We're a diverse team that love to talk about numerous aspects of a wide variety of games.

I’ve been asked before why the name Chalgyr’s Game Room (CGR). It was a bit of a whim (keep in mind, I was writing for an audience of me at the time). But some of my best memories involve the camaraderie and competition of gaming over the decades, whether it was my friends as kids, or as a father who played games with his wife and children. So, I wanted to make a digital ‘game room’ where we could get together and share laughs, memories and more. This is why you see the couch in so many of our images - that throwback to the idea of couch co-op and just sitting around with friends with controllers in-hand. I guess it only makes sense that CGR hit its stride when more people began to participate, to fill that digital game room with their thoughts and feelings.

The amazing thing? The site’s just getting stronger. Here’s a look at our page views over the last fifteen years. The last two years have been particularly strong for us. With over 3.6 million unique lifetime views and over 6 thousand comments? It’s clear we’ve found an audience. I made our site’s tagline “Where it’s all about the games” – here I can say “It’s all about the team”, past and current. 

Over 5,600 posts later, Chalgyr’s Game Room is going stronger than ever. Our best day ever? March 31, 2024 – so earlier this year with 171,709 views. I couldn’t have done it without a fantastic team, and we couldn’t have done it without our amazing readers. Here’s to a great end of this year for all of you, and to many more years of news, reviews and other gaming thoughts to come.

 

Article by: Nick

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The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - PS4 Review

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim by developer Bethesda Game Studios and publisher Bethesda Softworks—Sony PlayStation 4 review written by S. M. Carrière with a purchased copy.

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

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Welcome to Sonia’s Sassy Reviews, reviews of games from the unique perspective of a total newbie gamer whose only just started to indulge a lifelong love of video games, who also happens to be an adult(ish) woman. So, here we go!

Look, I know this game is ancient, by gaming standards, and I have been playing it for almost forever. I've never quite finished the game (or, at least the story. Can you every really finish this game?) until the night before writing this review. Hush. I didn't want to finish, okay? I didn't want it to be over.

Spoilers. Duh.

Character Design:

One of the things I like best about Skyrim is that you get to decide who you play as. You may choose your gender, your race, the details of your face, hell even your weight. Lordy. Half the time of my first gaming session with Skyrim was spent deciding what I looked like, I swear.

For the record, I almost always play as a heavy-set female Bosmer. With tattoos. Obviously.

Similarly, you get to choose your own play style. You may, for example, play as a magic user, destroying your enemies in balls of flame, lightning or... uh... other magics. Can you tell I don't play that character? You could play as a heavily armoured, heavily weaponed tank, who rushes in with a hammer or two-handed sword and obliterates your foes. Or, you could be a feisty, lightly armoured sword and shield specialist. If it suits you better, as it did me, you may instead choose to play a sneaky ranged fighter, specialising in sniping fools with a bow unseen. There are combinations of these, too, if you wish. This flexibility permitting various kinds of play-styles and personal player preferences when it comes to character design is to be commended.

The vast number of races and base facial features helps to lift the character design where it otherwise fails; all the characters are built the same. There isn't a whole lot of difference between the shapes and sizes of characters. Given the sheer volume of characters, however, I'm okay with this.

It's not like the cast is small. Furthermore, the lack of diversity of body sizes is tempered somewhat by all the different facial features of each person, as well as their various actual personality traits. They feel individual when you meet them.

Some of them are genuinely good folks.

Jarl Balgruuf the Greater	Irileth, Balgruuf’s Military Advisor
Kodlak Whitemane, Harbinger of the Companions	Grandmaster Paarthurnax

These are just a few of the characters I found I really liked while in game.

Some of them are, well, they're basically Nazis. Looking at you, Thalmor.

Ondolemar, head of the Thalmor Justiciars	Mercer Frey, leader of the Thieves Guild
Miraak, from the Dragonborn DLC	Alduin, the dragon Nazi, basically.

There are very few folks who are genuinely awful people in Skyrim. These are pretty much them

Story:

As readers of my Sassy Reviews well know, I gravitate towards games that promise me a good story. Games like The Last of Us, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, and 2018's God of War, are some examples of games that I adored, largely thanks to the story.

Skyrim is much the same, though the nature of the story is different. You, the player, find yourself thrown into a world in the middle of civil war, at a time when an ancient enemy shows up to make things hellish for everyone no matter which side of the conflict they fall on.

How and when all these issues are resolved depends entirely on the player.

It's this silver of story in an epic broader narrative that makes Skyrim so much fun. I delighted in running around the countryside, stumbling across various locations. The ruins, in particular delighted me. There was, for example, a ruined cottage that was literally just a door frame standing beside the road.

If you headed up north, you could stumble across a carcass of a mammoth, frozen in the ice, weapons of all manner sticking out of its hide, evidence of a great hunt.

There's a lighthouse in which lie the bodies of a family who had moved in to retire, only to come across a nest of man-eating bugs and their Falmer care-takers.

There is a skeleton that can be found opposite a sabre-tooth carcass, the said carcass being riddled with arrows.

Puzzle stones, randomly.	Rkund, Dwemer ruins
Random burnt down farmhouse	This mystery is hilariously called Pincushion Peter. Heh.

These crumbling locations, as well as dialogue references to past and current events, individual perspectives on these events, random encounters that show the aftermath of someone else's life or death situations and so on created a world that felt ancient and lived-in and entirely, utterly immersive. I wasn't playing a game, when I visited Skyrim of an evening. I was on holiday in another world... and then got myself involved with their troubles.

This is precisely how and open world single-player game ought to be done.

The story of Skyrim was vast, and we, the player, are just a little person in this epic narrative, doing what we can in the world in which we find ourselves. Yes, please.

Happily, also, there are very few true villains in the world of Skyrim.

Alduin, the world-eater, would be the main villain of the piece, him devouring souls in Sovngarde and wanting the end the world and all. Jerk. I would also contend that the Thalmor are also major villains, their whole superiority schtick making them basically Nazis. Jerks.

Every other person could be a villain or a hero depending on your perspective.

Ulfric Stormcloak is either a rebel hero or a selfish, power-hungry tool, depending on your perspective.

Honestly, I found I sympathised a great deal with Ulfric's cause. I'm all for the open worship of whatever or whomever as a deity so long as it hurts no one. The Thalmor and their superiority complexes didn't like that a human and not a mer is included in the divines and so outlawed Talos worship.

That said, the Stormcloaks were nearly as bad as the Thalmor when it came to the treatment of other races, and I wholly disagreed that shouting the High King to death was the way to resolve the issue.

I also believe that the war for independence was incredibly short-sighted. The afore-mentioned Talos was the first emperor. And also, if there was to be any hope to defeating the Nazis – I mean, the Thalmor – you'd need the strength of a unified empire.

Similarly, General Tullius can be a symbol of oppression, a tool of the Thalmor persecutors.

A native of Cyrodiil, the general has no real grasp of Nord traditions and is tasked with carrying out the terms of the White Gold Concordat, which is a betrayal of the Nords by the emperor. Depending on your perspective, General Tullius (who I do not doubt was modelled quite deliberately after Julian Caesar) could very well be the villain of the story.

Other opposing forces that might be the heroes or the villains depending on where you sit may be Delphine, leader of the Black Blades, and Paarthurnax, a dragon who seems to have his eyes on Alduin's position as king of the dragons. Leader of the dragons? Ruler? Whatever Alduin is to the dragons.

Both Delphine and Paarthurnax, however, are good folk, making the choice between them something to really mull over. For the record, Paarthurnax lives in my play-through. Sorry Delphine, but I'm not going to kill him. He's a friend.

All of these oppositions, existing within characters who are still fundamentally good folk, depending on where you stand creates a wonderful experience, and a world that is so immersive, it sucked me right into the story.

Also, I got to kill dragons and steal their souls, so...

Women:

I love how this game treated women. Not only is there an option for the most powerful person in Skyrim (hell, the continent, really) to be a woman (that's you... the dragonborn), but women were everywhere in this world, and they weren't a monolith.

There were female jarls, female companions, some of whom were absolute units, female travellers, shop owners, soldiers, rebels, friends, foes, wilting flowers, feisty leaders... The variety of roles afforded to women in game was refreshing and fun.

Nor was it forced. It just simply was. This world felt genuinely equal and it was fantastic.

Uthgerd the Unbroken, my companion for the majority of the game. She broke my heart when she retired to be the steward of one of my manors. I loved adventuring with her.

Not directly related to women, but I also appreciated how the game handled sexuality. You can marry folks the same gender in game if you wish. I did not. I played a female bosmer, and I married this dude:

Argis the Bulwark. Yeah, he's a hottie. Incidentally, Argis is canonically bisexual. He's a marriage option if you're playing a male character, too. I am here for it.

Game Play:

The game play was ridiculously easy to pick up, becoming second nature quite quickly; accessing and arranging your inventory, switching between weapons and spells, and so forth made perfect sense.

Also, you get your choice in how you play. I played a sneaky ranger-type, choosing as my companion tanks who would run into battle and take all the damage, keeping enemy eyes off me. First, this was Ungerd the Unbroken. When she retired, I went adventuring with Argis the Bulwark, who later became my game husband.

I really liked that the game could adapt so easily to people's preferred game styles, with a whole lot of options for mixing and matching. For example, I did not do magical things much, except for healing stuff. I maxed out my sneak, my archery and also put a number of points in lock picking, because it comes in handy. Any points in light armour were accidental. You get those by being hit a lot.

Playing wasn't stressful or confusing, even if I found combat with a sword and shield awkward and silly (slash, slash, spasmodic running). I absolutely loved delving in to ruins - the ancient Nord ones, and the Dwemer ruins. I loved killing dragons and stealing their souls. I loved making decisions that challenged my sense of morality.

There were a few odd bugs, like floating objects, and a horse that randomly followed me wherever I fast-travelled to (until bandits killed it. The bastards), to companions that forgot how to human and had trouble with stairs sometimes. Still, these bugs were more amusing than troublesome, and I look upon them fondly, like you would a playful horse mucking around in the field. They didn't affect game play enough for me to consider them problematic. Mostly, they were funny.

Skyrim was the game that got me into gaming. I bought my first console because I saw other people playing it, and I wanted in. It was my entrance drug. It is so incredibly immersive, swallowing well over 400 hours of my time in a world I could not get enough of. I cannot understate how much I love this game. I have two versions already (one for my Xbox and one for my PS4), and I'm saving up for a PS4 VR set so I can have an even more immersive experience. I cannot give it a perfect score, because of the many bugs, but it is by far the closest to it I've yet played.

Score: 9 / 10

Note: Most of the images in this review are from UESPWiki, The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages.

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The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - PC Review

I started this game about a week after it released, when a friend got me a copy for my PC.  He knew what a fan I was of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion - which was one of my first games for the Xbox 360 and opened me up to a whole new approach to RPG games.  I have not been a long-time fan of the series, however.  I have never played the earlier games in the series, but even then I knew that the introduction of dragons to the series was a huge move for Bethesda.

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