Harbour Master, he truly is the best of us. Alliance fellow HM, steward of the delightful Electron Dance, has been playing the games that made us. The latest – Chris Crawford’s unforgettable 1981 SCRAM: A Nuclear Reactor Simulator, required plenty of manual-reading and reflection on the misapprehensions about nuclear disasters so prevalent in today’s world. Harbour Master’s The Fukushima Syndrome is – as usual – worth checking out. Part 2 of The Fukushima Syndrome is where things get hot …
Back in ’03, a small French game development company, Nadeo, created a racing game within a system designed to allow people to easily build and share a plethora of community-created content. This Trackmania was a platform with so many outlets. It had fresh racing gameplay distilled down to bare essentials. It had a track editor that worked like Legos, including various brick themes. It had a car painter to paint and place stickers in real …
You! Yes, you there! With the bowler hat and the suitcase leaning against a lamp post sipping a fine cup of delicious Yorkshire tea. Have you played VVVVVV yet? No? Why not? Because you’re a bad person? Yes, that must be it. In fact right here it says you’re a terrible person. And we weren’t even testing for that. If you’ve yet to play VVVVVV despite the lure of delicious indie gaming goodness and even a …
Today I learned there’s such a thing as the Video Privacy Protection Act, a piece of 1998 legislation that apparently requires information about customers’ rental habits be kept secret by those doing the renting. Today it’s a thing because Netflix wants to integrate with FaceBook, and it can’t because of the law’s wording.
So because I don’t actually own an Xbox 360 (nor an Xbox, for that matter), I’ve always had to find other ways to play the (very few) exclusive games in their libraries that I cared about. So it was that I find myself blitzing through Halo: Reach on my brother’s console during a recent trip home. Because, seriously: Halo. What began rolling around in my brain as a review of Reach quickly turned into something …
I’m a little busy with stuff that pays the mortgage right now, so Steerpike will be quiet here at Tap for a while. Happens every year around this time.
In the interim, though, I’d like to note that it is currently – according to my neighbor’s outdoor thermometer, at 7:58 PM – 113° in Ann Arbor. That’s 45° to you Metricles. My poor air conditioning is struggling to keep it a mere 82° in my condo.
Naughty Dog’s Uncharted series are some of my favorite games of this generation, or ever. They are well-made, exciting, and have the sort of gripping storytelling and character development that so often eludes game developers entirely. Their cinematic nature makes the series seem like a shoe-in for film adaptation, but the director attached to the film, David O. Russell, seemed dead set on not drawing from the games. Like, at all. But with his recent …
Here at Tap, we occasionally are honored by guest editorials – from game industry celebrities, from people who are awesome, from others. This one falls into the latter category. You all know Armand K, one of our regulars, and a writer for Alliance of Awesome fellow BnB Gaming. No one really likes Armand; we sort of tolerate him. His drinking problem and general bad manners have caused more than one Tapper to grit their teeth …
Presumably Suda51 doesn’t. Nor does Tetsuya Mizuguchi. Or at least they don’t if June’s NPD numbers are anything to go by. As it turns out, Child of Eden seems to have tanked pretty hard. It’s currently only available on Xbox 360 with an impending PlayStation 3 release sure to give it a slight sales boost at worst, but even on a single format charting at number 83 on the back of 34,000 units shifted is …
From Dust is one of the summer games I am most looking forward to with Rock of Ages and Trackmania 2 following in chronological order. From Dust is a multi-platform game that advances the god game genre to heights of new beauty. The creator, Eric Chahi of Another World and Heart of Darkness fame, says that From Dust is most like a spiritual successor to Populous. It is one of the most beautiful games I …
I have this old Acer netbook that’s paid its dues. Now it lives by the sofa, out in the living room. I use it to see if that actress has done nudity order food, check my email during TV Time, that sort of thing. In hearty spirit of our (my) recent Game of Thrones world, the Netbook By The Sofa can be seen as my Barristan Selmy, my old knight that’s done its duty and should …
Today is July 12, 2011. An auspicious day for fans of A Song of Ice and Fire, which nonreaders may know better as the first-season-just-ended-to-great-acclaim HBO series Game of Thrones. The fifth novel in the (planned) seven-volume cycle, A Dance with Dragons, arrives today, after a wait of seven years.
Review by Brandon “Dix” Perdue Back to the Future: The Game Developer Telltale Games Publisher Telltale Games Released December 22, 2010 – June 23, 2011 Available for PC (version reviewed), Mac, PS3, iPad Time Played 10 hours (2 hours per episode) Verdict: 4/5 Thumb Up Telltale’s recently-completed episodic adventure proves nothing less than a love letter to the most charming sci-fi trilogy ever made.
One year ago Playdead Games‘ Limbo was announced as the lead-off title in Xbox Live’s “Summer of Arcade” for 2010. It wasn’t believed to be in development for any other systems until, little more than a week ago, a summer 2011 release for PS3 and Steam was announced. Today, Playdead have revealed those launch dates. Limbo will arrive on the PlayStation Network for North America and Europe on July 19 and 20, respectively, and worldwide on Steam, August …
Under normal circumstances the release of a patch is not a noteworthy event. However, the amount of bugs hiding in the crevices of Fallout: New Vegas at the time of its release would frighten even the most unflinching New York landlord. For that reason every patch implementation since last October has been met with dances around bonfires and such.