Sawing And Dropping Them
By John Walker on May 2nd, 2013.
On some levels, so much effort must have gone into Mars: War Logs. Not into the name, clearly – that’s an act of self-sabotage that can only have emerged as the result of some unconscious perspicacity as to the game they’d made. But it’s a big, long RPG, albeit one made of tight near-identical corridors, and they don’t just appear. And that’s just a bit sad.
The Begotten Realms
By John Walker on May 1st, 2013.
I don’t entirely know how to justify why I’m enjoying Neverwinter quite so much. Why I’ve found excuses to play it nearly the entire weekend, stay up late playing it this week, and even get annoyed that they were doing server maintenance at 8am when I tried to sneak in half an hour before starting work. There’s no question that it’s very good – it’s a superbly made MMO, predictable ongoing server teething problems on launch aside (I’ll get to those at the end). It’s enormous, jam-packed with so very much to do, extremely approachable, but elaborately complicated if you want it to be. I suppose its biggest crime is to be traditional in its structure, and it turns out that was exactly what I was looking for.
Get over the breaks
By Adam Smith on April 9th, 2013.
Eador: Masters of the Broken World will be released into our very own fractured realm later this month and I’ve spent a few hours with a preview copy and had many of my expectations defied. Is it more of a King’s Bounty than a hero’s swordsmanship and spell-biffing, or is it something entirely different? I’m still not entirely sure, but I’m looking forward to finding out.
Not The Robber
By Alec Meer on April 4th, 2013.
The boardgame I’ve played the most times, by far, is Settlers of Catan – and that’s not something I expect to change by time I reach my deathbed. Sure, it’s obvious, but it’s also a sweetspot of strategy and competition, as early co-operation turns to bitter rivalry and even the merest mention of sheep can reduce grown adults to shivering balls of purest hatred. I gravitated towards Lukáš Beran’s free, boardgame-like Expanze, which made no secret of its Catanic ways, with mixed excitement and anxiety. Excitement: Catan! Anxiety: But is it just a cheap’n'nasty, slavish rip-off?
No, it isn’t. It’s based on Catan’s essential mechanics – the gathering of brick, wood, sheep, ore and wheat, and the spending of these on the expansion of your agrarian empire – but it goes off and does its own thing with them. Better still, it turns them into a surprisingly workable singleplayer game.
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Smash Robot Telly-Tron
By Adam Smith on March 20th, 2013.
I just noticed that the spotlights are following me and that arrows flash at the side of the arena right before a power-up twinkles into view, hovering across the screen and leaving trails of excitement. Everything leaves glowing tracks or showers of sparks. Sometimes, naturally, the power-up is a score-spewing giant fruit. Ultratron is arena-based, robot dismantling particle heaven.
Satellite Of Love
By Adam Smith on March 19th, 2013.
When I first saw Consortium, I wasn’t sure what to think. There was fictional science occurring, that much was clear, but to what end? A couple of weeks ago, determined to learn more about this mysterious first-person adventure/RPG, I had the opportunity to play an early build and came away filled with wisdom and excitement. Now that the project is back on Kickstarter, I shall share both. From what I’ve played, Consortium shows itself to be a tight experience, heavy on communication and choice, and riddled with the unexpected. But what exactly is it?
visor-wearing Donnie Darko-hassler
By Cara Ellison on March 13th, 2013.
Remember those first fiercely atmospheric moments of Doom: you peering into the soupy murk, only stark corridors around you, and the echo of what sounds like someone clearing their throat repeatedly, but is actually something that will come to make you tense your muscles and prepare to mash ‘Fire’? I got this feeling when I started up the demo for Sapience, a retro-style FPS with RPG elements by Peter B. Funnell. It’s a sort of tingly feeling you get from your youth, I think.
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Alomany amnalomy alimony aargh
By Alec Meer on March 12th, 2013.
The greatest horror to befall popular culture in the last decade is not Michael Bublé, as is commonly believed. It is another Michael B entirely, and one infinitely more dangerous. Michael Bay’s Transformers movies were, somehow, some of the biggest box-office grossing movies of all time, you see. This means a generation of young and/or money-hungry creators are convinced that the path to riches is to include spiky metal insecty things with pallid neon bits invading cyan-hued American cities, accompanied by a boomy orchestral soundtrack. We’ve just seen it in Crysis 3, and now 11-bit’s tower-defence-in-reverse sequel Anomaly 2‘s at it. It’s not right. Why can’t game artists be inspired by Czech animation, Swedish architecture and Fleetwood Mac instead? I’d play the hell out of a game about asymmetrical clay bears trashing Malmo while Go Your Own Way plays.
BUT ANYWAY. Bayisms aside, the four levels of early Anomaly 2 code I’ve played suggest good things, building upon the RTS aspect of the tower-dodging action.
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Duplocity
By Adam Smith on March 8th, 2013.
I hadn’t played SimCity until the UK version unlocked at midnight and I’ve barely slept since then. Intravenous coffee, fresh from the bean, and a sumo wrestler’s weight of dry roasted peanuts have seen me through the night and now I shall convert the experiences of the last twelve hours into words. This is not ‘Wot I Think’, it’s just a step toward a closer study of the slickness of the systems as well as their shortcomings, and it’s also a minor chronicle of the European launch.
War Crime
By John Walker on March 4th, 2013.
The Least Serene Republic
By Adam Smith on February 19th, 2013.
They say history is written by the victors and they quite often go on to say that Churchill said that, but they don’t appear to have any proof of the latter. I’m here to prove the former wrong as well. This is a Europa Universalis IV tale of betrayal and bellicose bastards, in which the losers have the final word, and that word is an obscenity, bellowed across a field of the dead.
