15 public reviews
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Oregon Trail holds a special place in the memories of most Millennials as the first PC game they ever played. Rather than learning about American pioneer life on those countless journeys between Missouri and the Pacific Northwest, my peers were quietly snickering when friends and loved ones dropped dead of cholera or dysentery on the trail. The subject matter can be quite dark at times, but even today, the classic…
The most notable thing about Shadows of Undrentide is its companion character, Deekin. He is a goofy little creature; a kobold that, unlike his aggressive reptilian peers, has big dreams of seeing the world and writing epic tales. It is hard not to laugh at his absurd singing above the clamor of combat (he is a bard, after all), or to smile wryly when he threatens to marginalize a particularly rude character in his…
Read the full review Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide
At its best, Heroes of the Pacific makes players feel like they are in the middle of a Star Wars film, better than any game based on that galaxy far, far away. Setting up a torpedo attack on a mammoth battleship comes with the same sense of tension as a trench run on the Death Star, and seeing upwards of 150 planes swarming around a friendly aircraft carrier is an exhilarating reminder of the Battle of Endor. As…
Without question, Age of Empires III stands as one of the finest examples of the traditional RTS that has ever been made. StarCraft II fans are always quick to challenge this statement, but a marriage between Blizzard and the eSports scene saps too much fun out of their genre mainstay. Rather than require an obscene action-per-minute count and rote memorization of build sequences, Ensemble’s PC swan song gives…
Today, it is impossible to play Barbarian Invasion without comparing it against Total War: Attila. To its credit, the former provides a bright and colorful world, with a limited number of cities to promote the kind of open-field battles that originally made Total War so great. However, it is all built on a shaky foundational premise. This is a series at its best when there are a bunch of evenly-matched warring…
Oddly enough, Battlefield 1942 has only gotten better with age. Sure, the graphics are rough by current standards, and a third-party service like GameRanger is needed to even play it competitively, but it is still fun. Most of it boils down to the wide open map design, which necessitates a reliance on ranged gunplay that is too difficult for PlayStation and Xbox controllers to manage. Even if that were not the case,…
Dungeon Siege is one of the countless Diablo clones that released in the early 2000s to try and steal a piece of the Blizzard action-RPG pie. Its twist on the genre is that a party of adventurers, instead of a solitary hero, is charged with saving the world. While cool in theory, the practical reality of trying to control up to eight characters at once meant Gas Powered Games had to automate too much of the combat.…
Pong is a cross between air hockey and table tennis, where players get to position an otherwise unmoving paddle along a vertical track in order to knock a small white ball at the opposing side of the game board. Where Wii Sports and Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis found success with this formula in the past decade, its status as one of the earliest video games ever means its design was grounded in a time that…
If you happen to be a Millennial gamer, Psychonauts needs to be on your gaming short-list. Equal parts Nintendo platformer, LucasArts adventure, and 1990s era Nickelodeon cartoon, it was tailor-made to put a smile on your face. Whispering Rock Summer Camp is the home of our hero for the duration of the story, and much as Hogwarts instructs young wizards, this retreat is a school for psychics. Using his mental…
Time has not been kind to Final Fantasy VII. Without the shock-and-awe stature of its graphics to cow naysaying new players, its many flaws are easy to see today. Marketed originally for a teenage audience, adult gamers will likely tire of the juvenile plotlines and offensively stereotypical characters. Of course, that presupposes an American player can follow the narrative at all, since the translation to English…
Gamers will never again see a Warcraft game quite like Tides of Darkness. Unlike the hero unit focus in Reign of Chaos, Warcraft II is the epitome of the 90s RTS, with large armies, solid base building, a resource system creating flashpoints near gold mines, and diverse units for combat on land, sea, or air. Toss in a catchy soundtrack and graphics that look like an old Saturday morning cartoon and you wind up with…
Equal parts tactical strategy game and first-person shooter, Republic Commando proves itself greater than the sum of its parts. Enemy encounters are varied and fun, in a way that only sci-fi shooters can be with their assortment of alien and robotic adversaries. Squad commands are doled out in a system that is about as intuitive as possible, at least until voice recognition works its way into the realm of gaming. On…
Do not let the cute fish, improbable aliens, and frantic clicking fool you. At its heart, Insaniquarium is a strategy game. It just is not a very good one, despite its novel premise which has players managing an aquarium filled with creatures that literally poop gold. Should these riches be saved to buy an early exit from the level, or should they go towards the purchase of an additional fish? Would it be worth it…
When Far Cry asks players to duke it out with an army of gun-toting mercenaries in the middle of a jungle, it is just about the perfect FPS. Thinking tactically is the name of the game when sight lines, cover, and topography must be taken into account to have any chance at success. So what is the problem? It is that this is just a fraction of the experience, and the endless string of monsters in the middle of the…
Lemmings was, and continues to be, the king of the A to B puzzle genre. While modern players can easily spot its flaws, like the lack of a tutorial and the inability to select individual creatures from within a group, the simplicity makes this title truly special. What I mean by this is the rules and physics are clearly defined from the earliest levels, and then they never change. So no matter how mind-bending and…
