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The Walking Dead: Season Two – Episode Two (Spoiler-Free) Review: Trust Me
After establishing themselves as some of the best storytellers in gaming with Season One of The Walking Dead, Telltale Games certainly didn’t set the world on fire with either Season One’s 400 Days DLC or Season Two premiere All That Remains. While the pieces that made TWD great were there, the heart that made TWD special was missing.
Fortunately, despite having four games on the go right now, Telltale hasn’t bitten off more than it can chew. Episode Two of Season Two is a return to form for The Walking Dead series.
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Titanfall is Poised to Completely Change the FPS Genre
When I was at Fan Expo last August, someone in line for the State of Gaming panel asked the group of us waiting where we thought the industry was headed. Increasing the quantity and quality of free-to-play games was a popular answer. More mobile games for core gamers was another answer. Motion controlled games on Kinect, Wii U and PS Eye finally becoming proper gaming was a less popular suggestion but it was made.
After some pondering, I realized that those answers weren’t wrong but I had a better one. While all those ideas might be right, I think Titanfall might be a harbinger for where the industry is headed. It has nothing to do with mechs or pretty graphics or third-party triple-A games going exclusive. It has everything to do with dropping the single-player campaign and launching a game with only multiplayer.
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Titanfall Beta Impressions: Pilots and Rockets and Mechs, Oh My
One of the most hotly anticipated games of 2014 just wrapped up its beta testing period. For the majority of interested gamers, this was their first chance to play the heavily hyped and critically acclaimed Titanfall.
I somehow managed to get into the beta despite the fact that I rather detest multiplayer in first-person shooters. Granted, that’s mostly a function of my being terrible at FPSs. Single-player campaigns, like BioShock, I’m fine. Throw me into something like Planetside 2 and I’ll be into a sub-0.1 K/D ratio. Could Titanfall convert me from FPS neophyte to another shooter junkie? No but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t still fun.
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Contrast Review: Now That’s Not Thinking with Shadows
It’s only appropriate that a game whose review on Valentine’s Day has a love story. Okay, that’s probably a bit of a stretch when it comes to Contrast seeing as the game is a puzzle platformer where a man trying to win back his family is only really of minimal importance to the game. However, it’s there so I’m calling Contrast an appropriate game to review today.
When Contrast was released, it certainly carried some big expectations. While Compulsion Games was a rookie developer, the game had been selected as one of two free games on PlayStation 4 at launch for PlayStation Plus members. Was Contrast worthy of such a distinction as being on of Sony’s featured launch titles?
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WRC Powerslide Review: The Spin-off Doesn’t Spin Out
Milestone’s WRC series and I have a long history. I’ve played each of the four games and reviewed the last three. The series has evolved from TV presentation to arcade presentation. It’s tried to be rally sim and tried to be a WRC-licensed Dirt game. Every time it makes a change, they take two steps forward and at least one step back.
With WRC Powerslide, Milestone has completely gotten away from proper rallying. Instead, Powerslide is a WRC karting game. While I’ve been looking for the proper WRC series to embrace being a proper rally sim, Powerslide proves that you don’t actually know what you want from gaming until you get it.
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Critics Corner: Broken Age – Act One
The old Building (Critical) Consensus posts were never exceptionally popular and I was getting tired of doing them so I’ve decided to reboot the concept. I like the sort of meta-review summary of BCC but I’d like to try something a bit different. Rather than overall conclusions or summary statements, we’re going to look at detailed critical assessments on the game with specific opinions about gameplay elements, story, graphics and so on. So welcome to the Critics Corner.
I don’t think that Double Fine Games were planning to revolutionize indie gaming when they launched their Kickstarter campaign for Broken Age but that’s exactly what happened. What was just a project to make a Tim Schafer point-and-click adventure game ended up turning the industry on its head by showing that crowdfunding was a viable means to fund game production and that small devs weren’t always beholden to the whims of big publishers.
Still, Double Fine showed some of the issues with crowdfunding. Almost two years after the campaign launched, Broken Age is finally here but is being released in two parts to help fund the completion of the second half of the game. Scope creep and delays weren’t really considered a major risk to crowdfunders at the time but people think about it now.
So what do the critics think of Tim Schafer and Double Fine’s return to point-and-click?
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The Stanley Parable Review: A Successful Experiment
One of the terms that I’ve been hearing a lot lately is “experimental gameplay.” The other popular descriptor for games is to refer to some as art. They’re labels that seem to be haphazardly applied to anything that doesn’t conform completely to bog standard gameplay conventions. Gone Home was a game that the critics referred to as both experimental and art. While last week we found out that I disagree with those sentiments, I have found a game that both labels could apply to and certainly qualifies as experimental.
The Stanley Parable is an updated, full release of a 2011 Source engine mod. Like Gone Home, there’s no combat in The Stanley Parable. However, that’s where the similarities end. The Stanley Parable is so experimental, so unorthodox and so brilliant that it certainly earns its place as one of 2013’s best games.
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Gone Home Review: A House is Not a Home
This year’s surprise hit game was a little indie game called Gone Home. The debut effort of a small indie dev made up of BioShock 2: Minerva’s Den devs is in a way inspired by BioShock but much simpler and focused. For many critics, the straight-forward focus on story made it near-perfect and the game of the year. Many gamers, though, didn’t find it as good as it was hyped up to be. So where does it fall on the spectrum?
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The Walking Dead: Season Two – Episode One (Spoiler-Free) Review: Boulevard Of Broken Dreams
The surprise hit of 2012 was The Walking Dead. Given how often that licensed games disappoint and Telltale’s shaky track record before the release of the first episode of their The Walking Dead series, no one was expecting Telltale’s new game set in the universe of The Walking Dead comic books to be as great as it was. The first five episodes of The Walking Dead picked up dozens of Game of the Year awards along with seemingly hundreds of other awards in 2012.
So The Walking Dead: Season Two had a lot to live up to. Could the first episode of Season Two of The Walking Dead live up to the original or would it be underwhelming like the 400 Days DLC?
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Shufflepuck Cantina Deluxe Review: Back to the Future
The first video game that I remember playing was Shufflepuck Cafe on my dad’s old Macintosh SE. Sure, there were other games on there but nothing quite captured my attention like Shufflepuck. It might have been in black and white but the graphics looked fine, it had sound (which was a rarity on that computer) and it was just fun to play. I may have poured more hour into that game during my childhood than anything on my NES.
So when I saw this homage to the original Shufflepuck Cafe pop up on Steam, I had to pick it up, if only for nostalgia’s sake. Fortunately, Shufflepuck Cantina didn’t stop at recreating the original in colour but added some depth to the original.
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