REVIEW TO THE DEATH: Analogue: A Hate Story  vs. Super Deep Throat

    Cut to the chase and call Analogue: A Hate Story and Super Deep Throat companion pieces. The first, Christine Love’s newest femi-techno product o’ praise; the second, a game about having sex with women’s mouths. Yet, despite this

How Many Warlocks Does it Take to Screw up an Empire?

Arcane comes from the Latin word “arcanus” meaning hidden or secret. Paradox Interactive’s new game revels in both of these things, asking players to learn its quirks before unlocking its potential.  Cajoling into place an erratic mixture of city planning,

Dark Scavenger is the carrion crow of video games

The best indie games do one thing well. They have one mechanic, and they build everything around this central idea. Braid’s mechanical core—time traveling platforming—informed every element of its presentation, and it didn’t try to do anything else; it never

The Awesomenauts

Back in late 2011 I found myself spending a weekend in London to preview some of the biggest titles hitting our shelves; Skyrim, Dark Souls, Mass Effect 3 – but amongst these mainstream gems I stumbled upon a small time

Aiming for the Head in The Walking Dead

If you’ve ever spoken to an opinionated man in a vintage Night of the Living Dead shirt at a college party, you’ve likely had the concept that zombie movies aren’t really about the zombies firmly drilled into your head. For

Review: Fez is where I want to be

Home is where i want to be Pick me up and turn me round –“This Must Be the Place“ Fez is an anachronism. It shouldn’t exist. At least not here, not now. It belongs to another era, but in a

Losing Your Stride in rComplex

rComplex is a game of running. It’s not about running, it simply is running. Along the way you will jump, and slide, and occasionally shoot, but all these things are extraneous. This is a game of pure drive, where loss

Saturday Morning RPG is Traditionalist Retro Gaming Done Right

Meet Martin “Marty” Michael Hall, a ordinary high school kid with a remarkable ability to turn the mundane into magic. Marty’s story begins much in the same way many of our own teenage fantasies start — in our dreams. As Marty falls asleep, his dream is shaped by a TV show featuring the villain Commander Hood. Marty’s mind intercepts the stimulation from the show, casting him the protagonist in battle with Commander Hood: kidnapper of Samantha – the girl literally of Marty’s dreams – and proponent of shotgun-styled weddings. After getting his ass kicked, a witty wizard sporting an ultra hip demeanor bestows Marty with an “ancient artifact” that can take down Commander Hood – a ’80s styled Trapper Keeper.

Saturday Morning RPG’s emphasis on the old-school Trapper Keeper as Marty’s – and therefore the player’s – source of power mimics the mobile industry’s values in spite of the AAA console market. The Trapper Keeper represents tradition, a return to form, as power. The use of pixel animation makes SMRPG traditionalist. If you want, think neo-noir, only as Tom Auxier pointed out, the lines of influence are clearer for us videogame folk to see than for audiences to see in a movie like Brick, for example. And as Christopher Nolan, a traditionalist in his own right has proven through use of film over digital, utilizing an outdated form can be an effective tool toward innovation and creativity if done well and without a total neglect of modern benefits.

ZIGGURAT and the end of the world during coffee break

A wise man once wrote what I believe to be one of the core tenets anyone who calls himself a game reviewer should have in mind: if you want to know if a game design works, imagine that game with an endless mode. It’s one of those advices so simple and obvious only a genius could have thought of.

And now that genius went off to make his own endless game, ZIGGURAT.

It’s one of those things that leaves me both excited for the results and frustrated about my own inadequacies. Just like when Erik Wolpaw, who used to write hilariously astute reviews and commentary on games in his Old Man Murray website, went off to write arguably one of the best videogames ever made: Portal.

The result is that Tim Rogers, the number one defender of friction in games, made what is, together with Canabalt, the game with the most friction you can find on the iPhone. ZiGGURAT is a genre great game with so much friction I have the impression my iPhone is rumbling even though it lacks a rumble feature.

Dog walk, dog listen, dog lost

Ruins is a 2011 PC game developed by Cardboard Computer and can be downloaded here. Self-pity runs deep through the cerebellum, rots the spinal cord to a few strands of disintegrating rubber, destroys everything outside of mind – other people, other