Dustforce Review: Cleaning in motion

The question, whenever you talk about Dustforce, is “Is it Super Meat Boy hard?” Super Meat Boy has become the gold standard for difficulty in platformers, so much so that everything has to be compared to it. For instance, I would say that VVVVVV is probably half a Super Meat Boy except for the nigh-impossible ...

L.A. NOIRE and the Story That Wasn’t There

Hank Quinlan: “Come on, read my future for me.”

In some ways, a game based on Film Noir would be the anti-GTA. Ah, the GTA series! The pursuit of the American Dream! To fight that good fight requires a great deal of optimist, no? The optimist believes the future is within his grasp.

Tanya: “You haven’t got any.”

Noir Films, however, are filled with pessimists who already know that the game they are playing is futile. That what they are playing is actually a poker game of death.

“What do you mean?”

The world is merciless. It’s unforgiving. We are already doomed no matter what we do. In the search of the American Dream, the fall from glory is a surprise; in Film Noir, the surprise would be not to fall from glory.

L.A. Noire isn’t the anti-GTA. It certainly isn’t the gaming equivalent to L.A. Confidential… or Double Indemnity …or even Who Framed Roger Rabbit. L.A. Noire may be many things – but it certainly isn’t Noir.

“Your future is all used up.”

Dark Souls PC petition lists over 54,000 signatures and counting

I have yet to play Dark Souls, but I’ll be damned if its predecessor Demon’s Souls didn’t make me feel like trash for dying countless times. It was all worth it for the absolute satisfaction you receive after trotting through a dungeon or defeating a challenging boss. It is a darn shame that the unique ...

Demo Impressions: Fortune Summoners

Recettear, Carpe Fulgar’s first import project for English speaking audiences, succeeded in large part because of its demo. A massive slice of the game, the Recettear demo worked so well because it was immediately apparent why we’d want to play it: Recettear was a snarky, action-packed shopping JRPG with a lot of cuteness but also ...

Review: Rock of Ages

Something went wrong here. Let’s not talk about the Terry Gilliamisms. Those are lovely, and why you’ve already played the game. If you haven’t, and you appreciate Monty Python, here is my six word review for you: go watch Life of Brian again. If you’ve watched it a hundred times, maybe get Rock of Ages. ...

Preview: Defender’s Quest

So hard to know what to do with these indie games. Defender’s Quest is a tower defense/RPG hybrid we covered a couple months back, and it’s set to be released soon in the traditional “Indie Beta”, which means it’ll be done and available for purchase but not quite done. I’ve given a poke at a ...

Review: Skydrift

A couple days ago I wrote about downloadable games, ideally, being perfect little bites of gaming designed for the short experience. They’re either well-crafted, focused experiences, or they’re grasping for big budget success and gasping for air. Skydrift falls in with the latter group, but it does so with a huge asterisk. I’d say it’s ...

Differentiating downloadable games

High speed internet has birthed the cheap downloadable game. If you’ve played video games in the past five years, you’ve no doubt played one: priced under $20, only a few hours in length, as opposed to priced at $60 with a few hour campaign and a multiplayer mode. In many ways these downloadable games should ...

Ubisoft don’t learn, contemplate skipping PC release for I Am Alive, piss off a lot of people

Ubisoft’s downloadable post-apocalyptic adventure I Am Alive fell off the map a few years ago, re-surfacing only in the last couple of months with a trailer and a mini press blitz. In an excerpt from a recent interview with incgamers, creative director Stanislas Mettra expressed his team’s reluctance to pursue a PC release thanks to the threat ...

Cave Story+ air dashes onto Steam

The 2004 indie hit Cave Story has had a streak of success ever since Nicalis published the WiiWare version in 2010. Now Cave Story is the indie gaming sensation sweeping the nation, it is literally everywhere. The cute Metroidvania has managed to invade the Wii, DSi, Mac, and even receive a full remake on the ...

Out and about: A Walk in the Park

I’m always glad to see new indies come onto the scene, especially ones with such cool style (though admittedly one similar to something we’ve seen before). Here comes A Walk in the Dark, a new game by Flying Turtle Studios, which looks like a delightfully creepy stylish platformer. Playing as a skeletal dead cat is ...

Hunting for witches: Dragon Age and Skyrim

I’ve made no secret my love of systems in role playing games, a love birthed from Final Fantasies in my youth and Dungeons and Dragons in my college years. I still play Dungeons and Dragons, and when we play we run a weird mix: on one hand, we use content from every book (even the ...

Stealth Bastard Review

Warning: This review contains detailed narrative spoilers but only moderate mechanical spoilers. Stealth Bastard was developed by Curve Studios. Direction, design, and coding were provided by a chap known as “Bidds”. The art is courtesy of Tikipod and the music was composed by Ricky Honmong. Stealth Bastard is chock full of surprises. Sure, there are ...

Review: Rochard

Not at all what I was expecting. When you hear the title Rochard you think of something discreet, something possibly French, something with gravity based platforming and shooting (okay, I knew that before I went in). You expect an experimental, traditionally classy game. Instead we have John St. John straight playing a redneck, overweight space ...

I ain’t afraid of no Phantasmaburbia

It’s long been my opinion that indie developers should latch onto an obscure but happily received classic and run with its ideas. The indie platformer community has done this with Super Mario Brothers 2 (or Doki Doki Panic) and I’ve long held that the indie RPG community should do the same with Earthbound. Unfortunately, Earthbound ...

Review: Dungeon Defenders

Fate, cruel and twisted, conspired to prevent me from reviewing this game. I think it all started when I bought the game a scant twelve hours before we would get an official review copy like some sort of real video games site. It will end weeks from now, when I get tired of Dungeon Defenders‘ ...

Review: To the Moon

Few games try to be touching. Those that do regularly fail, because the player is rarely interested in being touched. He or she wants to blow things up or make characters look stupid, because that’s a lot more fun. To the Moon, then, must be lauded for succeeding at having a serious narrative. It’s Murakami ...

Simplified Strategy

Let me cut to the chase in this post about upcoming indie strategy good time Unity of Command: I love that it’s simplified. Simplification in the modern gamer lexicon is usually interchangeable with “casual”. Casual games are simplified, so making a game easier is synonymous with making it for casuals instead of core gamers. This ...