Retelling Nier Replicant into Nier Refrain

  (Warning: complete Nier spoiler, head to toe.)   NieR isn’t particularly well liked by the critics. This commercial failure also didn’t manage to save the studio from dissolving, and the game is likely to be forgotten. For good reasons

After pressing start: How tutorials became inefficient

Ever since game controllers became hand-crippling monstrosities developers have had trouble starting their games. Super Mario Brothers could teach us how to play in exactly three seconds: there’s a goomba walking towards you, and you have to press one of

Assassin's Creed 3 is true, speculation is permitted

It’s hard to decide whether to praise or berate Ubisoft for putting out an announcement for AC3 with nothing more than a release date (October 30th) and the news that it’s been in development for three years. The fact that game announcements can even happen like this especially coming from a company that could afford twenty seven marketing departments if they were needed is truly surprising. Whether you’re Half Life 3 or Primal Rage 2, it doesn’t make sense to announce a new product without at least something for people to look at or some news to get excited about even if it’s teaser trailer with some simple motion graphics of the game’s title or juicy details like, “Assassin’s Creed 3 will feature a third hidden blade hidden in the new protagonist’s boot!” Everyone already knew AC3 was coming out this year, but it just seems like the inevitable kickass trailer we’re going to get at E3 this year has been soiled by this squeezed-out fart of an announcement.

That said, it’s a few days later and we’ve had time to calm down.

Obligatory: Mass Effect 3 Ex Machina, Michael Bay, a demo

I’ll preface this post immediately: I am not Aram, writer of our many lists about things wrong with Mass Effect 2. Of the forty five items on those lists, I probably disagree with about thirty five of them. That being

Building Worlds: Signs in Borderlands

[Building Worlds is a series where Dan Cox examines one facet in a video game and shows you how, from that one angle, an entire society is reflected.] I walked right past it the first time. I didn’t think anything

What do bosses do?

The first boss I remember fighting was Doctor Robotnik at the end of Sonic 2‘s first level. I couldn’t beat him; I was six, and I hadn’t played a lot of video games that required twitch skills; I’d mostly played

The choice is a lie

Photo by ppdigital There seems to be an opinion rolling around in the game community that games are about choice and about player agency, and that one core strength of games is their empowerment of audiences by putting the audience

Everything old is new: Diablo 3 beta impressions

I have to admit, I expected something with more panache. With access to Diablo 3’s vaunted beta I expected something daring, something world-shaking. What I got was, well, Starcraft 2: a game of incremental improvements. This is not to say

The 5 worst things from Mass Effect 2

Mass Effect 2 did not deserve the highly positive response it received. The game is flawed at every level. Sadly, our love of its predecessor has blinded us to the ME2’s many problems. This post examines the five worst elements.

This is the final part of my four part series on the flaws of Mass Effect 2. The first post in the series was about the awful characters. The second examined the hellishly bad decisions in the game’s design. Part three enumerated 20 instances of terrible writing in Mass Effect 2.

These are the 5 worst things from Mass Effect 2.

5: All geth are good geth.

I would like to bring to your attention the codex entry for the geth from Mass Effect 1. Please note the last line:

“It should be stressed, however, that in all forms the geth are universally violent creatures.”

Let’s talk about why suddenly making the geth mostly good-guys in order to teach us a hackneyed lesson about sapience was a terrible idea.

Why Doesn't Valve Spill The Beans On Episode 3?

There’s few things us gamers anticipate more than a big game release. It starts when you first see and hear about the game, and you make a mental note to keep an eye on it. A few trailers later, an