“Nobody’s listening / Don’t know the world you’re in / You want someone to understand” croons David Leask in the first couple of lines of his new single “When You Think No One Loves You,” a sense of defenselessness trailing his every word. Leask has never been one to hold anything back from his audience in the music that he records, but he’s getting especially vulnerable with us in this…
The first few moments of Lifeless Planet are awe-inspiring and more than a little unsettling.
There’s an old adage in sports journalism that goes, “No cheering in the press box.” It means that no matter how much you’re rooting for one team or outcome, you must remain neutral as a member of the press. Reviewing Windforge has been my cheering-in-the-press-box moment because I’ve been eagerly awaiting its release since I first found its Kickstarter page that promised a Contra-meets-Minecraft building-block RPG. It had Steampunk aesthetics…
Comedy is one of the finest lines that a developer can walk while making a game. Do it right and you can produce a classic like Portal or the Monkey Island series that keeps the player laughing and engaged throughout the experience. But if you miss the mark, you risk subjecting the player to hours of eye-rolling and cringe-inducing ‘humor’ that can overshadow every other aspect of the game. Unfortunately,…
Max: The Curse of Brotherhood is a sequel to 2010’s Max & the Magic Marker that released across the Wii, Playstation Network and a variety of touchscreen devices. Developer Press Play has gone exclusively to the Xbox One for their 2013 sequel (with an Xbox 360 version reportedly in the works for 2014), and their outing represents one of the few post-launch downloadable titles available on the Xbox One to…
The opening sequence to Cloudberry Kingdom gave me more anxiety than most full games ever have or will. In it, a computer-controlled character navigates through an endless loop of randomly-generated platforming levels from hell, narrowly dodging spikes and sawblades on his way to safety. These levels looked impossible, with no discernable pattern or pause in the action to speak of. “How the heck am I supposed to do that?” I…
Storm is a physics-based puzzle game that tasks you with navigating a seed from a tree to a patch of dirt of the other side of the map using wind, rain , and lighting. Gameplay is divided into four seasons – spring, summer, autumn, and winter – with each of the 49 levels comprising one day in a season. Each season presents players with new challenges and gameplay mechanics, like…
Over the last few years, the genre of survival horror has taken a marked turn towards action horror. Later installments of series like Dead Space and Resident Evil play like Michael Bay blockbusters, and it’s rare to have an actual sense of dread for the monsters that you’re mowing down. That’s what makes State of Decay, the ambitious new XBLA offering from Undead Labs and Microsoft Game Studios, so refreshing.…
Fireburst is built on risk and reward – set your car on fire to boost and destroy opponents, but hold that boost for too long and you go up in flames yourself. Water cools your car down, allowing for more sustained boosts, but fire barrels threaten to raise your car’s temperature at every turn. It’s an interesting concept, and reminds me a bit of the Nintendo 64’s Star Wars Episode…
On its surface, The Summer of Beer and Whiskey is a book about the birth of the upstart American Association baseball league in the 1880’s and about Chris von der Ahe, the eccentric owner of the St. Louis Browns who purchased the team so that he could sell more beer. That in and of itself might make for an interesting story, but one with limited appeal if you’re not interested…
