Blog Archives
Speedball 2 HD Review: He Shoots… Off the Post!
With all the retro remakes of classic games have been coming out, it was only a matter of time before I reviewed one of them here. I had never played the original Speedball games when they were released on the Atari ST (and the dozen or so other platforms it was also available on) but given the lack of sports games on PC, I thought I’d give it a try.
All that ended up happening was me questioning the need for HD remakes of classic games.
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7 Best Games of the 7th Generation: Mass Effect Trilogy
Last week, when talking about Skyrim, I mentioned that a number of games outside the RPG genre incorporated elements of RPGs into their games. These included things like skill points, customization, inventory systems, questing, deep stories, dialogue tree and more of the classic RPG tricks.
This week’s entry into the 7 Best may have started life as being a bit more of an RPG than a third-person shooter but evolved into a third-person shooter that retained the strong influence of RPGs. Of course, if I boiled down the Mass Effect Trilogy to a series of gameplay mechanics and the evolution of the mechanics, I’d be missing the whole point of the franchise. Mass Effect’s strong suit and its claim to fame is the story.
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7 Best Games of the 7th Generation: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
If there’s one genre of games that seemed to take of the last generation of consoles, it was the role-playing game. The RPG genre has been around for almost as long as video games thanks to the popularity of the pen-and-paper RPGs, like Dungeons and Dragons. It was really this generation that saw the proliferation of RPGs and the incorporation of RPG elements into a number of games in other genres.
At the top of the class in this generation is The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. The fifth entry into Bethesda’s hit action RPG series re-set the bar for Western RPGs thanks to gorgeous graphics, a spectacular soundtrack and seemingly limitless gameplay throughout the open world of Skyrim.
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Need For Speed: Rivals Locked to 30 FPS on PC
Are you looking forward to playing EA’s latest Need for Speed game, Rivals, in 1080p at 30 FPS? Settle down, PS4 users. I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to the folks who are picking up the game on PC. Reports suggest that not only will the console version of NFS:Rivals run at 30 FPS but the PC version will be locked to 30 FPS too.
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Football Manager 2014 Review: Manage It Like Ferguson
It’s not exactly a great season to be a Manchester United fan. I know Sir Alex hand-picked David Moyes as his replacement but 8th in the table after a quarter of the season isn’t what you expect from United. Surely anyone could do better with this squad.
And that’s the premise behind Sports Interactive’s Football Manager series. Not everyone sees themself as the big hero on the pitch as you see in the FIFA series. FM is for the guy who has a couple of beers with his mates and says “I could do a better job running the team than that fool.”
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Cook, Serve, Delicious! Review: Allez Cuisine!
It’s a little known fact that I wanted to be a chef while growing up. When the Food Network first came to Canada, they had all these shows I loved. There was Good Eats and Iron Chef and especially Emeril Live. Then Food Network Canada launched and they replaced that with the charismatic black hole that was Christine Cushing and I stopped wanting to be a chef.
So I came into Cook, Serve, Delicious! hoping for something a bit more Iron Chef rather than a casual experience. You know, more El Bulli than Taco Bell. Fortunately, despite the fact that CSD is a mobile port, it’s still a hardcore experience.
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Your Body May Be Ready but is Your PC Ready for Next-Gen Games?
When we last checked up on the state of next-gen gaming, we found out that PS4 exclusive Killzone: Shadow Fall would be a 50 GB digital download. Now, we have some of the minimum specs for the PC versions of some next-gen games. If you use a slightly dated laptop as your main PC gaming rig, you’re definitely in need of a major upgrade.
Recently, we’ve seen the official announcement of minimum and recommended specs for three major triple-A releases this fall and they’re not going to go easy on your rig.
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Real World Racing Review: Suck, Squeeze, Bang, Blow
The four-stroke engine in your car goes through four phases in order to produce power. They’re colloquially referred to as suck, squeeze, bang and blow. Conveniently enough, you could say that each of the four strokes of the four-stroke engine accurately describes the recently released indie racing game Real World Racing. Unfortunately, I don’t say that because of how real the racing is.
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AMD Goes Big with Mantle API and Next-Gen GPU Announcement
Rumours ahead of Wednesday’s announcement by AMD at their GPU14 Tech Day event said that AMD was going to be unveiling something that would top NVIDIA’s flagship Titan graphics card at less than the price of the GTX 780. Not only is AMD taking the fight to NVIDIA but they’re also going after DirectX by trying to bring console-level graphics optimization to the PC.
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The Long Dark Crashes onto Kickstarter
Now that Kickstarter has opened up their crowdfunding platform to projects based in Canada, we’ve seen a massive influx of groups looking for money to make projects real. The one that has piqued my interest is a new game from a new indie studio based out in BC.
Hinterland Studio has brought together a core team that includes developers whose previous work experience includes time at BioWare, Volition, Relic, Riot and more triple-A games and studios to make a first-person survival sim called The Long Dark.
et geekera 