We're quarter of the way through the year now and everyone is noticing that games are, on the whole, very good. Rather than the few outstanding releases that either chased the early year window or missed their holiday deadline last year, we've seen a lot of stuff that's pretty interesting to the point where some weeks there have been 3 hot titles coming out on the same day. There have been seve...
Mass Effect is an interesting series. I dove into the first game in 2007, going as far as to back-to-back my Paragon and Renegade playthroughs and jumping into those two early books by Drew Karpyshyn (once the second arrived in 2008). The first book (Revelation) added to the impressive world-building that the series started with. Small touches like using accelerated metal slivers to provide eff...
It's the fifth year of annual gaming celebrations on my blog . Picking up from the end of last year , Kerbal Space Program did make a big impression with me in 2016 and really soared thanks to the engine updates (especially 1.1 and the UI engine changes) and finishing touches (better fonts and communications in 1.2). An evergreen title of slowly building out your space programme, I spent well o...
So I've been preparing for the KSP 1.2 patch (which will involve building out a satellite network to ensure communications with unmanned craft - I've never tried the mods that add similar functionality) by poking at the ore refinement system they added back at 1.0. Give me some practice with precision vehicles/landing and all that before the added risk of loss of communication is added into the...
So there has been lots of talk about internal render resolutions and game output this console generation. Is this game a 900p one, does the XB1 get forced down to 720p and then upscales it? It's a good topic for people who care about technical quality (say, all us render engineers who write the often boring code to throw polygons at screens via GPUs) and an endless swamp of people intent on hav...
[Getting to] Forza Motorsport (xbox, 2005) I initially played a bit of everything: from Destruction Derby to Carmageddon 's focus on more combat than racing, from the more pure experiences of the endless Need for Speed titles to Screamer . If it arrived on PC, I probably had a go on at least the demo. On the MegaDrive it had been the likes of Out Run , Virtua Racing , and Super Hang-On that kep...
I've enjoyed the Tomb Raider series(s). I mean, I've enjoyed all four (five?) of the different series of games that are called that or offshoot from that original 1996 title. [So this is less a review of the game than just talking about the series and then about PC gaming and some concerns this game raises - hence this as a rambling blog post, not a review. I don't aim to spoil the game for you...
So a fourth year of picking out notable games released (approximately) within a calendar year. I guess that makes it a tradition for this blog [GB blog archive had a database oopsie this year that seemed to wipe the blog posts from this archive and yet the total comments count shows the replies still exist somewhere in the system.] Life is Strange I've already written about why this game is emo...
Life is Strange is a narrative game about making choices. There are countless examples of this genre from RPGs to the popular modern Graphic Adventures but LiS embraces an element of save-scumming to remove the short-term experience of finality that drives a lot of those decisions. When players are allowed to fully explore every dialogue tree, a game about choices becomes one that can really fo...
I've used the phrase "legalised theft " a few times talking about Microsoft's policy of currency conversion that moved their digital stores from MSP (Microsoft Points) to local currency balances/credit. Any Microsoft Points that you had remaining in your Microsoft account have been retired, and we’ve added to your Microsoft account an amount in your local currency equal to or greater than the X...