Games: Everyone is playing them The ESA estimates 67% of American adults play video games, a number buoyed by the ubiquity of smart phones and the rise of free to play games (in the survey, 57% of respondents cited smartphones as a device they play on, higher than the percentage who gamed on console or PC). Even if someone just plays a mobile game once every week or two, they're a gamer. The re...
This is what I have concluded after watching the New Game + for The Quiet Man. Allow me to explain. *SPOILERS FOR HOTLINE MIAMI 1 AND THE QUIET MAN, IF THAT MATTERS TO YOU* Hotline Miami 1's story and presentation, in a nutshell: You play some guy (Jacket) who is very good at murdering criminals. Due to the game's minimal exposition, it's unclear how much the main character knows or what his mo...
So I've been thinking about Patrick's minor complaint that Shovel Knight is too easy, as I recently finished it, and I'm starting on some of the trickier achievements for beating the game without dying, etc. Patrick's complaint seemed to be that he didn't like that it's relatively easy to finish a normal playthrough, and that the devs made the challenge "optional" by putting in achievements suc...
Let me start with a question: do you think the prison camps we've seen in trailers are meant to be evocative of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp maintained by the U.S. during the "War on Terror"? I believe it is explicitly mentioned in some Phantom Pain material that one of those prison camps in the game is in Cuba, so I don't feel I'm making a huge leap of logic here. The red-band trailer for...
(Originally a comment on the Risk of Rain Quick Look, but it's kind of unreasonable to expect people to read a comment that long) I bought into Risk of Rain back in the beta after the first Quick Look Patrick did because I really like the look of it, the music, the characters, and the items. But something about the balance of the game still feels way off, both in the beta and the final release....
...it's not Puzzle Quest 1. And mind you, Puzzle Quest 1 wasn't even perfect; it was really great but still had some weird flaws, like "they had no idea how to balance the items", and "the last boss is complete bullshit and unfair unless you use the most broken items and skills possible". Puzzle Quest 2 is a burning pile of garbage covered in anthrax, where the art and writing are awful and non...
First, I'll be spoiling Deus Ex: HR, so stop reading if that's a problem for you. Second, if you please, watch this live action ad that was used to market Deus Ex: HR. The Trailer It's meant to be a propaganda piece of the anti-augmentation group in the game, Purity First, but the criticisms and issues raised are the kind of things that ideally would be primary components of the game's themes a...
So Paper Mario: Sticker Star isn't out yet, but on the recent 8-4 podcast, they somehow had an advance copy that they were freely allowed to talk about, which is odd. It reminded me I've been meaning to talk about this. To step back for a second, I thought Super Paper Mario was a huge misstep. Thousand-Year Door was great, front to back, since it added just enough to the combat system and the w...
I showed Tokyo Jungle to my roommate, and 30 minutes into it, our mutual friend came by, and also watched as I played it. After a couple hours of enjoying watching me play it, and the initial hilarity of "holy crap, you just took down a velociraptor with a beagle" wore off, they suddenly swung hard the other way saying "OK, so that's it, you basically just have to grind through all of the anima...
I remember that during the first 6-12 months of the 3DS being out, there was a lot of doom and gloom about the system not doing well, not having any games, and people just not being sure if it was going to take off. Then at some point halfway through 2012, I noticed that most gaming journalists seem to be of the opinion that it's doing pretty alright, and that now the Vita is the thing to worry...
For whatever reason, I can think of at least a few examples of Japanese video game series that started in the 1980s that were heavily influenced by American pop culture of the time. Donkey Kong had some pretty obvious similarities to King Kong . Metal Gear borrowed character designs from The Terminator , Escape from New York , and featured a story similar to Cold War action movies of the day. Y...
I would love it if a series I like would actually end, out of the blue, because then I would get some satisfying resolution to the fiction of the world. Instead, the more popular and interesting a series is, the more likely it is that publishers will want to keep making those games and milking the series, ruining it for me because eventually at some point the series and its fiction will start t...
While I think Starcraft 2's single player is enjoyable, the story felt almost nonexistent to me. I'll give them credit, in that the CHARACTERS felt more cohesive and fleshed out. And yes, the missions actually have some unique objectives to them, instead of "oh hey, you have to level an enormous sprawling enemy base", plus the ways you could upgrade your units were interesting. Still, the story...
Hey everybody. My friend is organizing a casual video game tournament for our group of friends and their girlfriends. It's a lot of Wii games, we don't take the games very seriously, and it's usually just an excuse for everybody to spend a weekend together at somebody's place. This will be the 3rd time we've done this. The event is styled after the Olympics, in that each person has to (poorly)...
While playing Civ 5, I've had an epiphany, but one that is not directly related to the games or series. When it comes to the Civilization series, I only played Civ II briefly at a friend's house years ago, and that's about it until I decided to jump in with Civ 5 earlier last year. I've been playing it here and there, and having a pretty good time with it. But man, most comments on gaming sites...
I was looking at the past winners of the Spike VGAs Best Original Score award, and some of the nominees are downright baffling, while some of the exclusions are equally disappointing. I think Bastion absolutely deserved the award this year, though I also remember Portal 2's music being quite good. For those who are interested, here are the past winners and nominees: Bastion , Batman: Arkham Cit...