Falling in Love: A Thirty Flights of Loving Review

  It was around the six minute mark when I realized my mouth was open. I wasn’t mouthbreathing, or mumbling to myself, or laughing (that came later); I was simply in awe. I cannot conjure up enough superlatives to describe the transcendental experience I had playing Thirty Flights of Loving. I think I was (am?) ...

Dust: An Elysian Tail Makes Hack’n Slash Feel So Right, Even When It’s Not

Dust: An Elysian Tail opens to a narrator describing the world of Falana as a lone, insurgent fighter takes on an army of opposing foes. Here, the shrouded combatant is mine to control, even though his fate is not. Beyond simple side scrolling movements, the only other action I’m allowed to execute is “wage war,” ...

Helm’s Deep With Friends: Swapping Slaps in Hero Academy (Steam)

In turn-based strategy the next move is always the most important. If you’re not thinking ahead then chances are you’ve already lost. This is especially true in Hero Academy, an iOS strategy affair recently released for PC through Steam. As your opponent rushes to your defenses, the decisions you make could determine which civilian populace ...

Symphony is the face of addiction

I am a nested loop of habits and addictions. I have a serious caffiene problem in permanent relapse. Like most self-identifying writers, I have a suggestively named oral fixation: I’ve been chewing on a straw for the past hour and a half. I don’t drink alcohol, because if I did I know I wouldn’t stop. ...

Awesomenauts: all for ‘naut

Astronauts explore space. Scribblenauts vivify scribbles. Awesomenauts create awesome. In an age where games are given pretentious titles like Wars of Death II: Bludgeoning, it’s nice to encounter something more succinct. When you first play Awesomenauts you may think it’s a game about short, snappy deathmatch battles like every other online action game released in ...

Deadly Neighbors 2 is multiplayer without the multiplayer

At heart, I don’t like multiplayer. Well, not quite. I love board games, which, for the most part, require other people. And I love playing games at the same time as other people, like with Kerbal Space Program. Demon’s Souls multiplayer spoke to me because I could leave inaccurate messages and imagine myself killing someone, ...

Building up, not tearing down in Kerbal Space Program

Over the past month, my favorite game hasn’t been a video one, but rather Vlaada Chvatil’s transcendent board game Galaxy Trucker, a title about building spaceships in real time and then flying them through increasingly deadly gauntlets of meteors, pirates, and derelict ships. It captures the two fleeting things I love about games in general: ...

Orcs Must Die! 2 as Mousetrap

I have a distinct childhood memory of the board game Mousetrap. I had a set that I inherited, like many of my youthful amusements, from my older sister. It was well-worn and woefully incomplete; many of the titular “trap” components were missing or warped, to say nothing of the actual game tokens themselves. I still ...

JETPACK JOYRIDE and the essence of bullshit

I hate the coins from the Super Mario games.

Even when they were born they are merely a vestige from the arcade days of endless gameplay. When Super Mario Bros. introduced the idea of a game with an ending, the coins were merely mending the gap from the concept of playing a something to beat the score. Now, despite the fact games have fully embraced the idea of chasing an end goal, those coins have never disappeared. As we talk about the benefits of applying game mechanics to our real lives, we started to recognize these coins as the most basic achievement unit. Coins are the atoms that form achievements.

The reason why I hate coins is that they are too easy to use. In both games and real life, coins can trivialize the concept of gamification. They blurry the line and, instead of enhancing your experience, game mechanics become an end in itself. That’s the exact point gamification starts being bullshit.

Jetpack Joyride is a bullshit game. There is no better way to put it. Basically, it’s Canabalt without the elegant simplicity, without the context and meaning, without the balanced gameplay that encouraged the player to gain momentum… but with many things Canabalt did not need. Coins and ranks and purchasable items and crap.

Basketbelle is being a kid on the playground

I was never very good at basketball. I played on the junior varsity team in middle school, and I scored exactly three points in three years. It’s fair to say I am a terrible basketball player: can’t shoot, can’t pass, can’t run, can’t jump. Can’t play. I fell into basketball through video games: I played ...

Cubemen mostly succeeds with new take on tower defense

Cubemen’s aggressively simple design combined with clever manipulations of traditional genre mechanics creates play that is fun, but slightly too long.

The game presents the player with three game types. Each revolves around a variety of three-dimensional levels, two or more spawn points, and the titular cubemen, voxel-style humanoids with access to a variety of weapons and color coding.

Units within the game are split between two classes. The first are your soldiers, units purchased with the game’s currency that fall into the standard Tower Defense types, including slowing units, morters, flamethrowers and the rest. The second type are spawned cubemen, who are created automatically by enemy spawn points in the Defense gametype and by both sides’ spawns in Skirmish and Mayhem modes.

Thomas was Alone Leads Indies Up and to the Right

The titular character in Thomas was Alone is a medium sized block — a veritable “every square” of pixelated protagonists.  Clad in a sporty red chassis and the ability to jump a respectable distance, he begins as a newly awakened artificial intelligence, awash in the ejecta of half-baked algorithms that result in quirky platforming puzzles, ...

Review: The Real Texas

  There’s something to be said for truth in advertising. One of the goals of marketing is  to try and sell a product to as many people as possible. This is all well and good when someone is hawking laundry detergent, but with art it’s a dicier proposition. There is not an art piece in ...

Vampires Just Want To Have Fun: The Adventures Of Shuggy

Some games try too hard. In an effort to please the widest audience and provide the roundest experience, developers cram copious amounts of (often underdeveloped) mechanics into a single project, making for a bloated, unfocused game. It is with this trepidation in mind that I say The Adventures of Shuggy, the new puzzle-platformer from Smudged ...

Resonance impresses with remarkable narrative, gameplay

In Resonance, developer Vince Twelve has created one of gaming’s more dazzling narratives. The game is a pleasure to play.

Resonance puts you in control of four characters thrown together in a science fiction setting to prevent world-wide disaster. A high-quality adventure game, Resonance has some of the best storytelling you’ll encounter on the PC. This is complemented by an interesting cast of characters, excellent 2D pixel work, great music and some unique game mechanics.

How do you Solve a Problem Like Max Payne?

The man is a high-functioning alcoholic. He spends his nights drinking himself into oblivion while the light of day finds him planting heavy metals deep into the flesh of his enemies with the biologically-ingrained certainty of a fifth generation lead farmer. This repetitive cycle is as precise and determined as the bullets Payne fires off ...

Ticket to Ride shows the future of board games may be digital

When people talk about entry-level board games, the kind designed to get your buddies over the hobby’s notoriously high barrier for entry, a few games are mentioned. Settlers of Catan gets first billing as a classic. Then you have modern titles like Dominion, wacky things like Cards Against Humanity, and others. Of course, there’s also ...

ROCKSMITH and the victory over gamification

Gamification is a sexy buzz word. It was born from the assumption that people value the things they struggle to obtain more than the things they freely receive. And so, the behaviorist wizard assigned points and levels to everything. His spell dictated that we would become more motivated if we became aware that every level passed or song beaten was a stepping stone, an achievement.

It was under the lure of this magic man that I purchased Rocksmith, a rhythm game you play with a real guitar and whose goal is to teach you how to play it. Perhaps now, with the ethereal motivation provided by gamification, I would be finally able to switch from the G chord to the C chord without having to stop and mentally command my fingers to do so. It was an impulse buy to be sure, but one that ended up being my most played game of 2011.

And here is the twist: gamification didn’t do a damn thing.