After Pressing Start: Joe's Night at the Movies

Are you a kid or are you an adult? That’s what Viewtiful Joe asks the minute you press start. Kids meaning easy, adults meaning hard – you feel inclined to say adult, since no one wants to be a kid.

Colonialism under the guise of the dungeon crawl: Etrian Odyssey and the invasion

If the dungeon crawl can be likened to anything, it’s colonialism. Remember how Britain used to own the world? They did so through power, education, and money, supplanting the cultural practices of indigenous people with their own ideologies. The Romans

Amnesia, Fear, and the Reversal of Power

My save in Amnesia: The Dark Descent sits stalled at just shy of an hour, ripe with potential but damning in brevity. The fact that I haven’t yet “pulled it together” long enough to make progress says a lot about

Playing DOTA 2 as a Newbie: First Impressions of the Beta – Part 1.

Valve has a reputation for producing highly polished games that communicate themselves clearly to the player.  What can they bring to DOTA 2, a sequel to the grandfather of the Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) genre?  I was lucky enough

After Pressing Start: Psychonauts’ Mental Dentist's Office

The human mind . . . six hundred miles of synaptic fiber . . . five and a half ounces of cranial fluid . . . 1500 grams of complex neural matter . . . a three-pound pile of dreams.

Psychonauts doesn’t even give you a chance to press start. Instead it says, “You don’t need to set up a profile or configure the look sensitivity and you already saw our logo when you looked at the box! Let’s get this show on the road!” I reserve a certain amount of praise for a game that just starts the moment you pop it in (or boot it up, since I played the Mac port from the Humble Indie Bundle V).

Vive la Révolution: A French Studio Brings Democracy to Development

Even as studios become larger, and publishers hide more and more behind their PR departments, some video game creators are taking the opposite approach and bringing the development process back into the open. From video games funded by Kickstarter to

Squires of Skyrim

From bestowing blessings to being the scourge of a countryside, dragons are encountered in tales young and old. Among their legends, one of the most enduring is that of battle against another powerful symbol: knights. From epic poetry to modern

Beating up God in Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth

In a laborious 45 minute cutscene (you have been warned), Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth reiterates that we have no control in our lives. Circumstance and directives rule this universe and you better get used to it, otherwise you’ll be spending an awful

Magic Needs To Be Mysterious and Unpredictable In Games

Most of the great writers of fantasy know that magic works best when left unexplained, when it is allowed to be mysterious and unpredictable.  There is, after all, little point in writing a story featuring magic if you then make

Breaking Up With "League of Legends."

Hi everybody, I’m Kevin and I have a problem with games. (Muffled chorus: Hi Kevin.) I’ve uninstalled Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri because I stopped doing anything else.  I’d sit down to play at my desk for fifteen minutes and then