Are strategy games and horror compatible?

There’s a moment in the first tutorial of XCOM: Enemy Unknown that felt like a revelation. Skip past the languid tutorial pacing, the stilted voice actor telling you what to do, and instead focus on the structure of the mission.

Sometimes games want you to think they're critiquing violence, but instead they legitimize it

There is a cost for everything. Video games, I worry, carry this unknowing. We agree to things that would be utterly horrific in the actual fictions of a game. I want to distinguish between the anti-violence, anti-“manshooter” rhetoric that most

An Ode to Turn Based Strategy

The turn based strategy is dead. Christoph Hartmann, president of 2K games, the publishers of turn based strategy replacement substance XCom, said so last month, that turn based strategy was the old men sitting across from me in the coffee

New XCom Trailer Makes Slimer Jealous

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdVb4UnqO7A&hl=en_US&fs=1&] So, you might remember a general air of skepticism coming from this person about the XCom reboot. Can’t be good. Sure, I didn’t have any particularly fantastic memories of the original (though it’s on my to-play again list), but

Some Thoughts on the XCom Reboot

Here is the initial full disclosure: I’m not especially fond of the original XCom games. Sure, they’re neat, but to someone who didn’t first play them until last Christmas, when he bought them for 5$, they’re a dated mess of