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August 16, 2012

Review – Tales from Space: Mutant Blobs Attack

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 1:04 pm

Review Mutant Blobs Attack
Drinkbox Studio’s critically adored Vita launch title has set out to absorb a larger audience with a release on Steam, offering those beyond the handheld set a chance to roll the irritable blob across twenty-four stages while consuming everything from hamburgers to space cattle.

Escaping from a sinister science lab, players allude authorities while finding the means to grow, eventually turning the tables on terrified citizens and soldiers through a campaign that becomes less about escaping humanity in favor of destroying it. However, the blobageddon doesn’t quite involve simply rolling around and devouring increasingly larger items like a rampaging katamari.

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July 9, 2012

Review – Resonance

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , — TJ "Kyatt" Cordes @ 9:17 am

Review Resonance
From the atomic bombs of yesteryear to the super colliders of today, modern history has carried one recurring theme: Science is going to kill us all one day.

Resonance is a game that seems to feed off of the worst-case scenario that played through everybody’s head when they first heard about the Large Hadron Collider a few years ago, and the game’s release syncs suspiciously well with the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle. It is also a deep, meticulously crafted adventure game.

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February 14, 2012

The Zombie Apocalypse Is Metal

Filed under: Editorial Rants — Tags: , , , , , , , — TJ "Kyatt" Cordes @ 11:45 am

Metal Dead
Making short work of explaining its title, Metal Dead begins with two friends in a car cranking heavy metal music while trying to escape an outbreak of zombies.

The way these two characters talk about the zombie apocalypse being a heavy metal dream come true, I was fully expecting this point and click adventure game to contrarily be a sobering tale of how such an incident is not cool at all, and is the last situation that anybody would realistically want to endure.

In a way, Metal Dead does defy romanticizing the idea of being one of the few human survivors among hordes of the living dead, but in a much zanier way than expected.

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February 2, 2012

Review – Law & Order: Legacies (Episodes 1-3)

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , , — Gregory Gay @ 2:56 pm


I’ve never really thought about it, but I have watched a lot of Law & Order. I wouldn’t call myself a diehard fan – I certainly don’t follow it with the same fervor that I do Fringe or Doctor Who – but I have probably caught hundreds of episodes of the show and its myriad spin-offs while searching the channels for some decent background noise.

It’s great comfort TV – often extremely clever, but at the same time, extremely structured. You know what to expect from the show; there’ll be a few witty cast members, a bit of mystery, and an interesting case that will be wrapped up within the hour (organized in such a manner that the first half will consist of the police investigation, while the second half will focus on the prosecution as they make their case in the courtroom). In fact, it’s a formula that seems to slot quite well into Telltale’s episodic game structure.

Even with a format perfect for a game adaptation, I would not in a million years have expected the Law & Order license to produce a good game. While flawed in several ways, by dropping many of the adventure game tropes that you expect from the studio and borrowing bits and pieces from the similarly themed LA Noire and Phoenix Wright, Telltale Games has produced an intriguing title that perfectly captures the spirit and conventions of its licensed material.

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January 16, 2012

Review – Choplifter HD

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 9:06 am

Review Choplifter HD
Given the number of vintage games that return year after year, I suppose Choplifter was overdue for a revisit in an era that loves adding HD to the end of game titles. The last time I laid eyes on that particular classic, the visuals crackled through a Commodore monitor and writing videogames as two separate words wasn’t yet something I considered a crime. My eyes were also crusted and red from spending hours flying to one end of the screen to pickup hostages and then flying back to the other end to drop them off – rinsing and repeating in an obsessive way that seemed normal during my childhood.

InXile Entertainment’s HD revival doesn’t detour from this core formula that made the most of technical limitations, offering a sidescroller that asks you to travel from one end of the screen and back again, again, and again. Despite what I consider a premium price point for the privilege, Choplifter HD is also a game of cheap and immediate thrills that doesn’t beg for more than a minimal time commitment, satisfied with whatever little bit of time you have to spare here and there. But aside from the explosions and burst play style, it’s not so easily written off either.

Plus, trying to squish people hoping to be saved is still a guilty bit of fun.

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October 29, 2011

Review – Batman: Arkham City

Review Batman Arkham City
There’s a certain vocabulary in the Batman fan community, a dialogue made up of stories that everyone recognizes, with an acknowledgment of common reverence that need not be spoken.

Few need to explain what they thought of The Dark Knight Returns, or ask about The Long Halloween. It is simply understood that one should know of these stories and their significance, as such tales are the seminal books of Batman.

It’s not often that outside media enters in to this exclusive lexicon, where respect and adoration are implied merely through reference. If one talks about Burton’s 1989 film, it is not simply assumed that he speaks of it with approval.

Those outside properties that have entered this elite class, such as The Dark Knight and Batman: The Animated Series (so revered that its original ideas bled into the comics for years) succeeded in the same way that Arkham City does: by being more than a mere cipher for the source material.

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October 26, 2011

Review – The Blackwell Deception

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , — TJ "Kyatt" Cordes @ 10:27 pm

Review Blackwell Deception
A while back, I was asked if I wanted to review an upcoming point and click adventure game called The Blackwell Deception. Before deciding, the first thing I did was check out the trailer for the game. Twenty nine seconds in, I said “holy crap, did that ghost just shoot that other ghost?! Sign me up!”

Unfortunately, the ghost shooting is not as rampant as I was hoping, but The Blackwell Deception is still an interesting and visually striking supernatural adventure.

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