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Welcome to Dragon’s Dogma! In this demo, you

Thank you for playing the Dragon’s Dogma demo.

Stupid. A waste of time. Evidence that Nintendo didn’t have a clue what it was doing. “Panic Mode”. Mental. Bonkers. Bloody ridiculous. Massively monstrous. Cheap looking. Ugly. Insane. An admission of failure. Useless. Baffling. What the fuck? Frankenstick!

These are just some of the words and phrases you might have heard mentioned last September in response to Nintendo’s unveiling of the Circle Pad Pro. Many of them by me, as it happens. So today I went out and bought one.

It’s awesome.  Go play it.

I love that someone at Bethesda actually went to the trouble of finding a Nathaniel Hawthorne quote that used the word “rage” – “The fiend in his own shape is less hideous than when he rages in the breast of men.” Maybe I’m an asshole and id Software always intended that quote to drive their …

If you have been hanging around around the Steam catalog lately, you’ve probably seen this indie game from Zachtronics Industries. The Steam action catalog seems pretty thin right now and my son and I have been playing a handful of manual puzzle games recently. Sink or Swim, Rush Hour, Alcatraz, TipOver, and River Crossing have …

Today is my birthday – thirty-six, if you must know – and my brother Marcus (whose fifth novel comes out on June 9, don’t forget!) loaded me down with a mountain of treasures, including CD Projekt’s latest, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. I own the original Witcher, on account of a Steam sale, but …

Where to begin? Stupidest game ever? Most obnoxiously altered voiceover? Highest quotient of clicking? If the open beta available on Steam is any indication, DarkSpore – the pathetic grasp at success so profoundly failed with the medicority of Will Wright’s original Spore – this is not one you’ll want to spend your Galleons on. Why? …

“Kill with skill,” advises Bulletstorm’s ad copy. That rhymes so it makes a nice tagline. “Kill as brutally and hideously as you possibly can within only the loosest confines of physics” doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily. Bulletstorm is exactly what it wants to be: a zany, foulmouthed, crass, absurdly violent fiesta of carnage. …

Steerpike is many things, my friends: roguishly handsome, devilishly charming, effortlessly-groomed, witty. One thing he is not is well-disciplined. So though I did stick to my guns and refuse to pre-order Fate of the World on Halloween, it is me you’re dealing with… I bought it a few days later. Now, I still have an …

Not long ago the staff had a Serious Discussion (which lasted 3 minutes and consisted of “why not?”) about whether our First Impressions section should include demos… that is, whether we can state first impressions based on one. It didn’t occur to us to set up some kind of rule about how long the demo …