Feature: A tough cup
While it was a long time coming, Cuphead dazzled me with its 1930s cartoon style, a callback not just to the old days of animation, but the individual techniques used by Fleischer and Disney in their earliest works.
Posts tagged “Have You Played”
Feature: He's a Football Wizard... There has to be a twist
Natural Soccer is a football game where you can bend the ball in impossible and ridiculous ways while it's in mid-air. Besides this one trait, it's a pretty ordinary - and very simple - take on the beautiful game, and while I was charmed at first sight I didn't know quite whether it could keep me entertained for more than an hour or two. But…
Feature: No objection
You're dead. You messed up, but so did they. That bus has bought you a one way ticket to the afterlife - the wrong afterlife. Your namesake has landed you in philosophy hell, I'm afraid, but it's fun here. Promise.
Feature: I'm not crying
What an unexpected journey that was. I certainly didn’t expect the direction Rime went in. I don’t want to spoil the ending, but washing up on an island as a small boy, with a beautiful fox friend to help guide the way as you solve puzzles, sounds absolutely lovely, right? But what a turn it took in the final couple of chapters. What. A. Turn.
Feature: Fortknight
With Stronghold: Warlords recently announced at E3, now seems as good a moment as any to look back on the game that kicked off Firefly’s seemingly endless series of castle ’em ups back in 2001. In fact, I’m genuinely astonished to learn that Warlords will be the ninth game in the series, as despite loving the first instalment, I’ve managed to play precisely none of…
Feature: Not that Black Friday, idiot
The Iranian Revolution of 1979 is not exactly well-trodden ground for videogames. But at least one game took a swing at it. 1979 Revolution: Black Friday is a game in the style of Telltale, a story told with playable cinematics and quicktime events. It's mostly made of conversations and the drama that comes from making a bad decision instead of another, equally bad decision. It…
Feature: Spandau Ballet b-side
This is a bit of a cheat because I didn’t really play this one. For a period until I was about 12 the only PC in the house was in my big brother’s room, which meant I was not allowed to play it or go in there unless he was in a good mood. On those occasions, me and my younger brother would each carry…
Feature: Gonna take my norse to the old town road
An idea I’m happy to see the back of, is the notion that “graphics” is a one-way sliding scale towards photorealistic perfection. While I’m certainly fond of games that exhibit hyperbudget beauty along the lines of Metro: Exodus or Shadow of the Tomb Raider, I’m equally - probably more - excited by those who eschew realism in order to utterly master a particular aesthetic. Often,…
Feature: Can you hear them screaming?
No, that’s not me screaming the game name at you, that’s how it’s stylised. Though I’ll sentence case it when I mention it in the rest of the article because if I talk about ISLANDERS like this it might make you spill your tea all over your keyboard. I don’t want to make you jump, plus we hold no liability for tea-soaked keyboards.
Feature: Help
Have You Played: That game you can’t quite put your finger on
You know, the one with the dogs. Or were they wolves? Did it have animals? I think it had animals.
Feature: Spoiler alert: you haven't
It was a rhetorical question. I know you haven't played BallHoops. If anyone apart from my brother and myself has ever played BallHoops, I'd happily eat the Poäng I'm sitting in.
Feature: I smell a rat
I've always thought Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide did a lot for the Skaven's image. What were once an unconvincing race of miniature rat folk, are now as horrifying as an entire horde of zombies.
Feature: Blocked
I played nine hours of sandbox puzzle game Starseed Pilgrim. It has been six years since it came out. I still don’t get it.
Feature: Oblivion is coming
Let me take you back to 2005, when game names were probably just as stupid but at least a little less confusing. I'm like, twelve. I've just discovered multiplayer first-person shooters are a thing, that I like them, and that I like Star Wars: Battlefront 2 in particular. My tag used to be "Oblivion", and my obsession grew to the point where I once joined…
Feature: Grubby cool
Beckett is weeeeeeird. It's a story-driven sort of adventure, except what it really is, is a scuttling little cockroach, and the cockroach smokes 40 Lambert & Butler a day and hasn't washed in a week. And has depression, probably.
Feature: Come to the dark side
Few games have given me as much of a power fantasy as Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds Saga. This real-time strategy from the long-missed Ensemble Studios took Age of Empires and slapped Star Wars over the top. So even in 2001 it looked dated. However, what it lacked in looks, it made up for with stormtrooping scenarios and custom modes.
Feature: Take me to your leader
You know that age-old idea that games should be more like FILMS because films are ART, and games should be like ART too? Well, I think there's a very good reason games shouldn't be more like films, because then we'd have more games like The Deadly Tower of Monsters on our hands, which, frankly - *record scratch* Sorry, everyone, Katharine from the future here, taking…
Feature: Your Reactions Are Awful: The Game
There's an episode of Black Books where Manny discovers that he can play the piano perfectly on his first attempt. In my family's lexicon, comprised almost entirely of TV and film references, "I'm Bill Baileying it" has become an oft-used phrase that means instant and improvised expertise. "I don't know what's happening or how on earth I'm doing this, and I want it to end…
Feature: In the clink
The Elder Scrolls games delight zero-to-hero fantasists by introducing you as a prisoner in every installment. Shackled on a ship, locked away in a keep, transported to the block on a prisoner’s cart. It’s a nice tradition, the reincarnation of the world-saving pluralist nobody, always in chains. But these games lack true resolve. They set you free immediately, after serving practically no time at all.…
Feature: Fix it fix it fix it fix it
Broken Age was Tim Schafer’s triumphant (?) return to point and click adventure games. It was crowdfunded on Kickstarter, and was the first game where the campaign got sort of wildly out of hand, in that they asked for like $400k and ended up with over $3 million. Developers everywhere starting looking at crowdfunding and rubbing their chins with suspicious intent, and here we are…
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