“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…
John M. Collins is the godfather of the modern paper airplane. That might not be the sexiest title in the world, but few people have obliterated a world record the way that Collins did, crafting a paper airplane that flew 226 feet and 10 inches, a full 19 feet and 6 inches farther than the previous record holder. And now, Collins is kindly offering you the tools to follow in…
Playing Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon reminds me of the 90’s action flick Solo. Solo was the worst kind of 90’s movie, with the same super-soldier tropes, ridiculous set pieces and cardboard acting that Blood Dragon parodies so successfully. But back in 1996, my eight-year-old wanted desperately to see Solo. Alas, its PG-13 rating proved prohibitive. It wasn’t until years later, when I stumbled upon Solo on Netflix, that I…
When I was a child, one of my favorite books was a reference guide to all of the monsters and otherworldly creatures in H.P. Lovecraft’s massive bibliography. It didn’t matter that I had never actually read one of Lovecraft’s stories, the illustrations and descriptions of each oddity captivated my ten-year-old self in a way that few other books could. My fascination with animals both real and fictitious has continued to…
My fiancé’s sister and I recently had a 20-minute conversation centered around a simple yet surprisingly difficult-to-answer question; what is your favorite song? It’s a question akin to the standard “what three items would you take if stranded on a desert island?”, except that the answer to this particular question felt much more substantial. I imagine that you can tell a lot about a person by what their favorite song…
Considering the Sacred series’ history of open-world action-RPG games, the release of Sacred Citadel as a downloadable side-scrolling brawler with light RPG samplings is a bit out of left field. But despite the dramatic departure in gameplay, Sacred Citadel is an enjoyable addition to the XBLA library, albeit with some flaws. Sacred Citadel serves as a prequel to the upcoming Sacred 3, and casts you as one of four playable…
The first time I saw Police Precinct, it was at the tail end of its successful Kickstarter campaign in early 2012. A year later, after exceeding their pledge goal by over $3,000, publishers Common Man Games and Passport Game Studios have released their anticipated game to the public. But does the final product live up to the early promises? Police Precinct casts you and up to five friends as one…
It becomes clear very early into “Donnybrook: A Novel” that author Frank Bill has seen some stuff in his southern Indiana hometown. When he isn’t working his day job in a factory, Bill has built his young writing career chronicling meth dealers, criminals, bare-knuckle fighters and all other varieties of desperate, dangerous and sometimes depraved characters on the wrong side of life, first in a collection of short stories titled…
In 2011, indie publisher Re-logic released Terraria on PC, and saw sales erupt to the tune of 1.6 million copies. Two years later, and backed by international publisher 505 Games, Terraria has made its way onto Xbox Live Arcade, and the result is one of the most robust offerings on the platform to date. Terraria is a 2D platformer with a heavy emphasis on exploration, harvesting materials and crafting. It’s…
It’s only 10 minutes into my Tomb Raider playthrough, and Lara Croft has already taken more of a beating than most action stars do in an entire movie. So far, Lara has nearly drowned, been knocked unconscious, set herself on fire, impaled herself on a piece of rebar, narrowly missed being crushed by rocks, and tumbled out of an exploding cave before collapsing into a sputtering, whimpering heap. This is…
