Category Archives: Reviews

BATMAN: ARKHAM CITY and the douchebag in all of us

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It’s late in Arkham Asylum. Dawn will break soon and it seems like the nightmare Joker would unleash onto Gotham was averted. The game is about to end, but, before it does, a call about Two-Face is overheard on the radio. It seems Batman: Arkham Asylum is all but over for Commissioner Gordon, you and me. But not Batman. He flies off to handle another crisis in Gotham City. He must endure. The game offers us a taste of what it is like being Bats, but just a taste. What that ending says is that never truly became him. His martyrdom must continue after the credits rolls.

Sometime after the first game, mayor Quincy Sharp, former warden of Arkham, together with the help of Dr. Hugo Strange, reallocated all criminals to a closed-off area in Gotham City and named that new prison Arkham City. The developer’s goal in doing this is pretty straight forward: to finally get the full experience of being Batman, as he scours the city for criminal activity.

In doing so, what they have managed to do was to corrupt all that understanding of what it means to be Batman that was so well-crafted in the first game. Batman is no longer a hero. He is a “video game hero”, with all game manias that entails.

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Review: Rise of the Video Game Zinesters

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This is the sort of review to begin with a description of myself, the reader: I am a 24-32 year old white, heterosexual male who comes from a very liberal background (I live in the Portland, Oregon of the East, Western Massachusetts) and, while I write about video games, I do not make them. These are all very important conditions to understanding my reaction to Anna Anthropy’s Rise of the Video Game Zinesters, a work of astounding ambition that wants to teach us that “anyone can make games.”

It is part academic history of video games from an outsider perspective. But it’s also a “how-to” guide to making games, an inspirational tool, an autobiography, and a lengthy rant about the state of the industry. Rise of the Video Game Zinesters succeeds at some of these points better than others; a passing familiarity with Anna Anthropy’s previous work, which I lacked, will no doubt inform you, before I even begin to tell you, which parts succeed and which points fall short.

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Sine Mora – XBLA Review

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Shoot ‘em ups—in my mind—have always been games about sex.

It’s not the phallic imagery. Nor is it the screenfuls of bullet-semen. And while the pacing is often frantic, frenzied, down and dirty even, I can’t say that it’s more than an afterthought really—a kind of post-coital reflection. No, for me the relationship is far simpler: Shoot ‘em ups, more so than any other genre, are games about the quiet accuracy of fingertips and tongues; that task us with intimate proximity, not only to the onscreen hordes, but to the landscape itself, undulating and unpredictable. There’s an honest simplicity in the proportions, the solitary you and the myriad it.

And as far as lovers go, Sine Mora‘s top-notch. Debuting today on XBLA, the long-awaited first collaboration between Suda51’s Grasshopper Manufacture (Killer 7, No More Heroes) and Hungarian developer Digital Reality proves that shoot ‘em ups can and always will be the second sexiest way to spend an afternoon. While the genre often struggles with striking a balance between newcomer approachability and hardcore longevity, Sine Mora is equally considerate to both. You want a game to roll around with for a few hours? It’ll handle that. But crank up the difficulty, and I …

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The digital god, Proteus

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Proteus is an ancient Greek god, called “The Old Man of the Sea”. His name carries the weight of newness, of lives left unlived and a world untouched by man. This is the impression Proteus, a game by Ed Key and David Kanaga, gives us: it is a new world for us to explore.

Inspired by taking walks in real life, along with aimless travels in video games, Proteus bottles and sells the feeling of discovery, the thrill of cresting a hill to see what’s on the other side. It gives us a world full of wonders and lets the player walk around in it, taking discovery at its own pace.

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Draw Pinchbeck pretty, Dear Esther’s got grass

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The syndicated remake of 2008’s Dear Esther is out in a day and there’s hubbub. People seem to think that something wonderful is just breaching the horizon. And they’ve been talking – everyone has – about the life-changing power they’ll be imbued with. By the time this is published, thousands of people will have already drunk themselves into a Dear Esther paralysis. Just a taste and they’ll have grown feeble from the knees down, just like that.

I have no doubts that the game will be good. It’ll be better than that, probably, and then some. Like clockwork it’ll happen: top scores piling up, whitewashing the floor of every game-related site for a few hours. The praise will be a full-up foamy pit with good things and great things about Dear Esther and the criticisms will be a pathetic snake ditch, sandy, and boon to plague. There’s got to be something to say – something big – that slanders, slurs, smears.

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Dofus Review: A pretty gem with one too many flaws

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I’m just going to start with this. I hate the standard MMORPG gameplay. I hate cool-downs, auto-targeting, and watching arrows curve to hit me because the shooter’s accuracy stat defeated my agility stat. I often look at games with a system like this and wonder, “Why don’t they just be honest and make it turn-based? It’s all decided by ability scores and dice rolls anyways.” Dofus, while quite enjoyable in many ways, has made me eat my words on that opinion.

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Review: Pineapple Smash Crew

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Thanks to Pineapple Smash Crew I have screamed at my computer more than any other game.

These weren’t screams of rage, or frustration: they were exhortations. “No, Jools, keep away from the fire!” They were accompanied by pleading—“Okay, Roo, we just got to get you out of this level in one piece”—and depression—“No! Stoo! Why did you have to die!” Because at its heart, Pineapple Smash Crew, like its obvious predecessor Cannon Fodder, is a game about stories. It’s not a game about burly space marines shooting anything that moves (though this does happen), it’s a game about life and death, the struggle for survival.

Pineapple Smash Crew delivers because it does everything it tries to with such aplomb. There are exactly two mechanics in the game: running around shooting things with a PC-centric twin stick control set and grenades. And the grenades are laughably, lovably dangerous. Pineapple Smash Crew plays its best card immediately. It gives you grenades and missiles, which you will fire with reckless abandon. And then your four little guys will be close to death, because you didn’t expect friendly fire.

You might as well call it Friendly Fire: The Game.

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Punk baby, lycanthropy rock

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KEYBOARD DRUMSET FUCKING WEREWOLF is a 2011 independent game by Cactus and can be played here.

Something in the freshly-minted Swedish air made KEYBOARD DRUMSET FUCKING WEREWOLF a totally feasible, attainable thing. It’s an attitude – some counter-cultural, punk, piss on everything attitude that found its niche in underground games. It’s the intercourse of anti-everything and pro-pixels; rejection is the only alternative to mainstream success. It’s a drug-riddled six year old let loose in an arcade.

But it’s no Pixies, no Big Black. Screaming’s not reserved for emotion or guttural terror. Chords you forget are there except when they line up at each scene change and usher in a new platforming suplex. KDFW is not a passive music experience. You’re the newest band member and you play the keyboard, smashing ‘x’ and ‘z’ until finger fatigue wins you over and your breath slows and slows and slows.

Whatever’s in the air, it’s thick and snarky – some disdainful impertinence for our modern mainstream video game culture. I don’t have a problem with this. No limit can be breached without sidelining the norm and embracing edginess. Here, gradual steps are for chumps. Here, we take leaps and we color them pink.

All those …

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Wish upon a Starwish

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Flash game Starwish has only the best of intentions. It combines JRPG style advancement and narrative with shmup style combat reminiscent of Gradius, and endeavors to make an entertaining soup out of them. And while it stands as definite proof of concept, Starwish falls into the traditional JRPG traps: poor pacing, a lack of integration, and being too damn long.

Starwish begins with your character, the loveable Deuce, getting shot down on the imaginatively named “Home Planet” and meeting one-third or Starwish’s harem, Ginny, the cute, clumsy one. There’s also the mad scientist, violent one who doesn’t know how to deal with human emotions and the tsundere childhood friend. The first third of the game focuses its energy on which one of these girls Deuce likes.

That may sound utterly terrible, but it’s not a terrible story for the first third. Maybe this comes from optimism, seeing the game marry visual novel with Gradius, but the first third of the game is well-paced. It bounces back and forth between Deuce flying missions on Home Planet, shooting down enemy drones and looking for the resident macguffin, and Deuce flirting with ladies and talking with the strong cast, which also includes a drunken panda, …

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DARK MEADOW and the Monologue Conundrun

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We shouldn’t like monologues – particularly in games. Games are about agency. They are about the player acting out its desires. Monologues are contrary to that spirit of agency permeating games. They enforce passiveness and reflection. Above all, monologues are intrusive. Unlike cutscenes, one cannot skip a monologue happening in-game.

And yet here is Dark Meadow! A game that basically works as a one-man show, with a comedian stand-up hoping to entertain our protagonist with his musings via loudspeaker – and it’s captivating!

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