Falling in Love: A Thirty Flights of Loving Review

  It was around the six minute mark when I realized my mouth was open. I wasn’t mouthbreathing, or mumbling to myself, or laughing (that came later); I was simply in awe. I cannot conjure up enough superlatives to describe

Dust: An Elysian Tail Makes Hack’n Slash Feel So Right, Even When It’s Not

Dust: An Elysian Tail opens to a narrator describing the world of Falana as a lone, insurgent fighter takes on an army of opposing foes. Here, the shrouded combatant is mine to control, even though his fate is not. Beyond

Helm's Deep With Friends: Swapping Slaps in Hero Academy (Steam)

In turn-based strategy the next move is always the most important. If you’re not thinking ahead then chances are you’ve already lost. This is especially true in Hero Academy, an iOS strategy affair recently released for PC through Steam. As

Symphony is the face of addiction

I am a nested loop of habits and addictions. I have a serious caffiene problem in permanent relapse. Like most self-identifying writers, I have a suggestively named oral fixation: I’ve been chewing on a straw for the past hour and

Awesomenauts: all for 'naut

Astronauts explore space. Scribblenauts vivify scribbles. Awesomenauts create awesome. In an age where games are given pretentious titles like Wars of Death II: Bludgeoning, it’s nice to encounter something more succinct. When you first play Awesomenauts you may think it’s

Deadly Neighbors 2 is multiplayer without the multiplayer

At heart, I don’t like multiplayer. Well, not quite. I love board games, which, for the most part, require other people. And I love playing games at the same time as other people, like with Kerbal Space Program. Demon’s Souls

Building up, not tearing down in Kerbal Space Program

Over the past month, my favorite game hasn’t been a video one, but rather Vlaada Chvatil’s transcendent board game Galaxy Trucker, a title about building spaceships in real time and then flying them through increasingly deadly gauntlets of meteors, pirates,

Orcs Must Die! 2 as Mousetrap

I have a distinct childhood memory of the board game Mousetrap. I had a set that I inherited, like many of my youthful amusements, from my older sister. It was well-worn and woefully incomplete; many of the titular “trap” components

JETPACK JOYRIDE and the essence of bullshit

I hate the coins from the Super Mario games.

Even when they were born they are merely a vestige from the arcade days of endless gameplay. When Super Mario Bros. introduced the idea of a game with an ending, the coins were merely mending the gap from the concept of playing a something to beat the score. Now, despite the fact games have fully embraced the idea of chasing an end goal, those coins have never disappeared. As we talk about the benefits of applying game mechanics to our real lives, we started to recognize these coins as the most basic achievement unit. Coins are the atoms that form achievements.

The reason why I hate coins is that they are too easy to use. In both games and real life, coins can trivialize the concept of gamification. They blurry the line and, instead of enhancing your experience, game mechanics become an end in itself. That’s the exact point gamification starts being bullshit.

Jetpack Joyride is a bullshit game. There is no better way to put it. Basically, it’s Canabalt without the elegant simplicity, without the context and meaning, without the balanced gameplay that encouraged the player to gain momentum… but with many things Canabalt did not need. Coins and ranks and purchasable items and crap.

Basketbelle is being a kid on the playground

I was never very good at basketball. I played on the junior varsity team in middle school, and I scored exactly three points in three years. It’s fair to say I am a terrible basketball player: can’t shoot, can’t pass,