Blog Archives
Gunpoint Review: Spying Excellence
It’s not everyday that one single indie game, an indie game that’s the first effort of a former gaming journalist, causes the whole of the gaming press to pause and take notice. But that’s what we have with Gunpoint, the rookie effort of now-former PC Gamer writer Tom Francis. I say that he’s now a former PC Gamer writer because the commercial success of Gunpoint has given Francis the financial freedom to pursue game development full-time.
So could the debut effort of a man who hasn’t made a game before and put it together in off-the-shelf game making software be worthy of all the praise it received? Yes. Yes, it can.
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Super Puzzle Platformer Deluxe Review: Jump and Gun
Before I got around to playing The Last of Us, I found a fun little sink published by one of new best friends of indie developers everywhere. Adult Swim Games’ move from the flash game market to publishing games on Steam was unexpected but their propensity for getting simple but fun games straight onto Steam without going through the hit-and-miss Greenlight system benefits both the developers and gamers.
Their second release on Steam is another upgrade of an Adult Swim flash game. Super Puzzle Platformer Deluxe might be a bit of a misnomer but that doesn’t make Andrew Morrish’s creation any less delightful to play.
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Polytron Announces Fez 2
Love him or hate him, Phil Fish made a damn good video game when he and his team at Polytron made Fez. (Review coming eventually, I promise.)
In an announcement at the Horizon conference, a one-day video game arts show run by Venus Patrol and the LA Museum of Contemporary Art, Fish officially announced that Fez 2 is in development and would be coming eventually on consoles to be named later. Hey, Phil, the Wii U doesn’t charge indies for patches!
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Building (Critical) Consensus: State of Decay
Just after implying yesterday that we’ve been inundated with generic zombie games, we get an indie game that does the opposite of The Last of Us. While TLoU is about the story, the characters and the approach to how you play, Undead Labs’ State of Decay is an unabashed zombie survival horror.
The presentation of State of Decay might not be perfect but the depth of the gameplay and combination of the various gameplay mechanics make this one of the best zombie games ever made. It’s just too bad that it’s an XBLA exclusive. I’d love to try this on PC.
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TBT: The Black Tower Needs Your Money to Make Your Classic JRPG Dreams Come True
I don’t think I’m going out on a limb by saying that Final Fantasy just isn’t what it used to be. That stretch on the PlayStation 1 and PlayStation 2 from 7 through X-2 was full of great games that people still love and still want to play. Given the desire for an old school JRPG, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the growing indie segment of the market is coming to the rescue.
Last week, the crowd funding campaign for TBT: The Black Tower started. If you’re a fan of the old-school J-RPGs like the PS1-era Final Fantasy games and Xenogears, a group of French developers need your money to make this homage to the great JRPGs happen.
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Element4l Review: Slip Sliding Away
Sometimes, I need to play a game that’s on the calm side. As fun as driving cars at speeds approaching 200 MPH and shooting baddies with overpowered weapons is, I like to throw a quiet game into the rotation to mix things up. Lately, that’s been the oddly spelled but appropriately titled puzzle platformer Element4l.
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Space Combat Sim “GoD Factory: Wingmen” Needs Your Money on Kickstarter
I’ve been waiting a long while for a solid space sim. I was hoping that Rogue System would be that game but, unfortunately, their Kickstarter didn’t work out. Now, there’s a Canadian company that’s giving me hope. Quebec’s Nine Dots Studios needs your help to make their epic looking GoD Factory: Wingmen a reality.
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Game Dev Tycoon Review: The Art of the Deal
Et Gamera Studios was in trouble. A number of recent sequels of previously popular IPs were struggling both with critics and on the shelves. Going from older platforms to new ones or from PC to console with their series just wasn’t working for them or their pocketbooks. Having gotten a high-interest loan and laid-off a third of their staff to keep the developer solvent, they went back to the well for another sequel to the franchise that had saved them twice before…
By now, you’ve probably heard of Game Dev Tycoon. Developer Greenheart Games made waves by releasing a “pirated” copy of the game that caused pirates’ businesses to fail due to piracy. Between the coverage from major gaming sites and personalities, their website was overloaded for most of Monday as a result. Their unorthodox strategy for dealing with pirates made their game a hit. But how is the game?
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Game Dev Tycoon Fights Piracy with Irony
Did you get a pirated copy of Greenheart Games’ new Game Dev Tycoon game? Struggling massively to make money in your simulation? That’s not bad game design or even a bad crack. That’s something that Greenheart did to teach game pirates a lesson.
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Papo & Yo Review: A Game in a Metaphor
What make a video game a game? That’s a question that is being asked with increasing frequency. It’s also a question that one could ask about Papo & Yo. It’s a game with a story and a message hidden behind a metaphor but the actual “gameplay” is fairly thin. So does that mean it’s a game or a metaphor?
et geekera 