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Fare Thee Well, Outernauts

By on August 1, 2012 with 12 Comments

I’m not one for freemium games, but when Outernauts launched last week I couldn’t resist. I mean, a space Pokemon game made by Insomniac? Sign me up, Facebook be damned. Sure, free to play, or freemium or whatever the hell they’re called may not be my thing, but I love Pokemon, I love Insomniac and I’m fond of space in that it is necessary for our survival.

For the past week, I’ve been able to successfully navigate around Outernauts’ weird, free to play restrictions, but all of that has, unfortunately, come to a screeching halt and all over my inability to do two things. Technically that’s not true. I am unwilling to do one thing, well, two really, and that makes me unable to do another thing.

Come with me, to spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace!

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Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD Review

By on July 27, 2012 with 5 Comments

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater HD

Back in the halcyon days of the late 90s, extreme (rather, “XTREEM”) sports games were as prevalent as FPS’ are nowadays. Like the “doom clones” of today, most of them were pretty shallow and generic, until Neversoft came on the scene with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. The first three Hawk games were nothing short of a revelation – they brought relatively deep physics-and-tricks based gameplay that actually made good on the “extreme” promise. Nailing increasingly insane (and insanely named) tricks was utterly exhilarating, and, as the HD reboot proves – is still one hell of a ride. Continue Reading…

Heroes of Ruin in Review

By on July 27, 2012 with 8 Comments

Maybe someone with more critical training can successfully answer why some dungeon crawlers, a genre based on a repeating “kill-collect-equip-sell” loop, are joyful romps through subterranean depths, while others eventually spiral into boredom. Lord knows I certainly can’t.

What I can tell you is that Heroes of Ruin is firmly in Camp Boring, squandering away its early appeal with tedious fetch quests, a broken economy and more backtracking than a presidential campaign.

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Cracked LCD- I am the Bad News Bears of Board Gaming

By on July 26, 2012 with 19 Comments

You’d think that I’d be pretty good at playing games after three decades of playing them and one spent writing about them. You might think “hey, I bet that Barnes guy must be a real competitor what with all of that experience”. Maybe you’ve even thought it would be awesome to hit me up for a Summoner Wars game to take on a “real pro” at the game. Is this a good time to mention my win-loss ratio at that game online is 15-42, nearly three losses for every against-the-odds win?

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Terminal State ===>The Doldrums

By on July 24, 2012 with 26 Comments

In case you haven’t noticed, there really hasn’t been Jacqueline frackin’ poo-poo coming out in terms of console games lately. It’s almost like we’ve reached that stage where all that releases for the major platforms are movie tie-ins and half-hearted sequels that are too early for the next-gen boat. But we’re still a year or more out from the Xbox 720 Netflix Player, which will have a credit card reader attached for you to pay for every bullet you fire in Call of Duty, and the PS4, which will debut at a thousand dollars retail with a new Crash Bandicoot game designed to really show off that hardware. To quote Belgian EBM masters Front 242, we’re in the doldrums.

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It Takes a Simple Man to show the Complexity of Role-Playing

By on July 20, 2012 with 9 Comments

Cabbages are a central feature of both Skyrim and Olaf's tale within it

By happy coincidence, I happen live and work in Bath, which is not only a lovely city but a mere stone’s throw from where most of the UK’s best video gaming magazines get written and published. So, obviously, I keep a pretty close eye on the material they put out. And thus I came to discover in CVG the saga of Olaf, a simple denizen of Skyrim, and his quest to accumulate enough gold to buy a manor house without adventuring, just exploring and doing day-to-day jobs like hunting, mining, chopping wood and picking cabbages.

Olaf’s tale is incredibly compelling. Of course the narrative arc and writing style are good but what makes it particularly absorbing is its innate contrariness. Skyrim is a game environment crafted to allow mighty-thewed warriors and wise mages to become famous through deeds of high and daring adventure, not a cabbage-farming simulator for peasants. That the intent of the game designers can be subverted in such spectacular fashion is perhaps the acid test of genuine “role-playing” in a computer RPG, a genre that’s more commonly synonymous with stat-crunching power builds than actually stepping into the shoes of a fantasy character. Previous experience with Bethesda’s open world RPGs has demonstrated that simply giving players freedom is insufficient: most will still power-game, and most non-adventure related activity quickly becomes boring.

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Cracked LCD- The Day Board Games Criticism Died

By on July 19, 2012 with 38 Comments

 

There are several damning points of failure that undermine serious writing and analysis of tabletop games, deep-striking notions such as subjective experience and the sublimation of the media to social interaction threaten to render games criticism invalid or even irrelevant. Although these factors are often not addressed by most self-styled amateur games reviewers, who are content to provide readers with a summary of rules and product qualities bookended by a thin statement establishing credibility and a noncommittal opinion, they weigh heavily on the writer seeking to evaluate games as a viable medium of expression. But how do you critically and comparatively assess a design such as Chaostle, which is a regressive Neanderthal of a rules set, when you have fun playing it and it meets its design goals? How do we value impeccably designed games such as Caylus or Princes of Florence that aren’t fun to play on paper, but your group makes them come alive with trash talk and metagame narrative? How do we account for a game like Castle Ravenloft, where one group completely loves it while another hates it and yet another is split down the middle, causing at least three distinctly different instances of the game to occur? Continue Reading…

The 2012 Binky Beach Report

By on July 18, 2012 with 16 Comments

Last week I was at the beach, and as with most trips to the beach, I got a chance to sit back and do a whole lot of nothing. I ate a bunch of food, swam a lot, played a lot of Summoner Wars and generally took some time to let my brain breathe. I’m not going to lie, it has been a stressful year. My dog died in January, both of my kids have various learning difficulties that we’re working on getting sorted out, I’m still trying to figure out what my games writing life looks like in a post-GameShark world and I can’t find a Transformers Prime Vehicon figure to save my life. A vacation was just what I needed.

I didn’t figure anything out while on vacation, didn’t try to, really, but I did come away from Hilton Head with a few observations. Lucky for you, I’ve decided to share them. Unlucky for you, they’re in no certain order. Such is the brain of the recently vacated: jumbled as all get out.

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DiRT Showdown in Review

By on July 16, 2012 with 3 Comments

This is not what I expected. I’m not an expert on the DiRT series, but I do know that it is the descendent of Colin McRae Rally, that DiRT 3 made a big deal of proclaiming that “Rally is back,” and that dirt usually refers to an earthy material found to the side of paved streets. Silly me, thinking that DiRT Showdown might be an off-road racing game.

Traditional races involving laps and cornering skills are few and far between, and even those typically have hooks, such as the familiar Elimination mode. You can reasonably divide Showdown into three styles, each with its own set of vehicles; racing, demolition, and the technical maneuvers of gymkhana (eg performing hairpin drifts and 180s for points). Without a common theme, Showdown feels like a handful of prototypes polished to acceptable standards and lumped into a retail package.

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The Eternal Angst of the Backlog

By on July 13, 2012 with 15 Comments

huge game collectionAs Todd pointed out earlier, the Steam Summer Sale is upon us, and it’s a thing of beauty. For someone who now plays primarily on her Mac (and PC/sorta through Wine), Steam Sales are my new drug of choice. Portal 2 — which I missed, is 5 bucks today. SpaceChem (which I’ve wanted to play forever) is $5. I could be in gamer heaven, If only I didn’t have such a staggering backlog.

Like all gamers with jobs and life responsibilities, my stack of games is almost as thick as my shame for not having played half of them. It’s worse on my home machine – almost the entire Indie Bundle from May/June has sat untouched, just begging for me to play. I want to sink my time into Amnesia: Dark Descent. I want to finally (yes, finally) play Braid and Super Meat Boy on their own terms. I want to actually finish at least a decent portion of the 30+ games in my XBLA library, and good lord, do I want to open my copy of Mass Effect 3. Continue Reading…

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