As a fan of the setting in general, Shadowrun Returns gave me very much what I wanted, and I can mostly only fault it for leaving me wanting more.
“It’s not that I wouldn’t recommend Face Noir to a hardcore fan of the genre. There’s just a lot better that’s floating around out there right now in adventure game land, and despite a layer of modern polish and some pretty good art and sound design it doesn’t add a lot for the English-speaking audience.”
This is Telltale throwing us a bone – a nice meaty bone with some good stuff on it – and hey, I can think of worse things to do with five bucks.
It’s powerful, it’s brutal, it’s stark and funny and tragic. It’s long enough to satisfy even though you don’t want it to end by the time it does. No one else is doing quite what Naughty Dog has done here.
In most every modern 3D video game, you play as a badass white dude who is an expert at every weapon he encounters, regenerates his body in a way that makes him essentially indestructible, and mercilessly massacres other men by the hundreds. In High Moon Studios’ Deadpool, I play as Deadpool. Take that, ludonarrative dissonance!
I don’t know if the game will replace my bi-weekly D&D game, but as an adaptation of the D&D system in general there’s a lot to like about it. I can see myself spending a lot of my upcoming evenings in Neverwinter.
…most of the traditional “review” stuff is in the video portion; if for some reason you dislike videos and prefer not to read the many words, here’s a sum-up: 4A Games done brung it good. Were this year’s competition less stiff, Last Light could, flaws and all, easily contend for Game of the Year.
What you’ve heard about Deadly Premonition is probably wrong.
…
Deadly Premonition is not so bad it’s good.
It’s really, really good.
…a delightful, charming, fantastic tale with some clever puzzles and a well-realized fantasy world.
After the amount of yammering on I’ve done about Star Trek games, I would be remiss to not review Star Trek: The Video Game, based on JJ Abrams’s version of the franchise and bridging (some of) the gap between the 2009 movie and this year’s Star Trek Into Darkness. The game was described at E3 as a “bro-op,” alluding to the highly cooperative nature of the Kirk-and-Spock-centered gameplay the game intends. To adequately explore this, I called on my friend and fellow Trekker Kristine Chester of Fanboy Comics to help protect New Vulcan from Gorn invaders.
Now you’re thinking with portals … proverbs, and a light show.
If you like reading excerpts then this may not be the review for you, because after you click the ‘Read More’ button there are no more excerpts in this article. I know, right? “Just one excerpt?! What was he thinking?” Who the bloody hell knows?
Retro City Rampage is the Meet the Spartans of video games.
Our own Mat C reviewed Alan Wake in 2010, producing a definitive, thoughtful piece of work. I agree with basically everything he said and the way he said it, so I don’t mean to just regurgitate. Mat took care of a lot of the heavy lifting for me by doing the Reviewer’s Job; my intent is to look with the space of years, a platform change, and perspective between the game’s 2005 announcement, its 2010 self, and its now self. Alan Wake is an exceptional effort that could have been even better. Yet to reject it as just a missed opportunity is unfair. There’s more to it than what we got, but what we got is still a superb game.
And I made a video! You gotta watch my video. Click the button! CLICK IT!
There are a few games that I break out semi-regularly. I don’t have a schedule or anything, it’s just that sometimes when I’m in a certain mood, or when the weather is behaving a certain way, or what have you, certain games will call to me. One example is Defense Grid: The Awakening. If you find me playing it, chances are I’m sick or depressed. These states happen pretty often with me so I play a lot of Defense Grid, and for years I’ve been meaning to come back and write something more about it, something more than what I wrote in the review linked above, because that review just isn’t right. It isn’t right at all.