Back from the Atom: The X-Men Post Battle of the Atom
Unlike most event comics, which trade in boredom, the first nine issues of Battle of the Atom actually worked as a story.
Playing Fables: The Wolf Among Us
The Wolf Among Us, Telltale Games’ second adaptation of a hit comic book series, landed last week. Their previous work, an expansion on the Walking Dead mythos, won innumerable awards last years and was hailed […]
How Valve Hopes to Change the Videogame Console Market
If Valve can launch a four hundred dollar entertainment box that can coexist nicely with the modern tabletized world, they’ve suddenly presented a good alternative.
Embracing Dragon Age’s Source Material
(The game’s) unvoiced goal is to revive the old days of role playing games. As much as it can, it attempts to cop the vibe of classic titles like Baldur’s Gate and Planescape: Torment, Dungeons and Dragons based properties
Broken Claws: When the X-Men Got Boring
This time last year, Marvel’s X-Men were mired in perhaps the most insipid event in their entire forty year history: Avengers vs. X-Men. Its name provides pretty much all of the plot: X-Men fought Avengers, […]
Do Videogames Have to Be Fun: Papers, Please and Monotony
Papers, Please, a game by Lucas Pope for PC and Mac, endeavors to be boring. You’ll spend your hours as a border guard in 1982 Russia analogue Arstotzka, checking and double checking papers…
Pretty Pixels: The Many Explosions of Mercenary Kings
There’s precisely one reason someone would pick up Mercenary Kings, one of the newest titles on Steam’s Early Access platform (for games that aren’t quite finished): the art of Paul Robertson. This isn’t a knock […]
Gods Will Be Watching: We Can’t All Be Heartless
I’ve gotten twenty days into the grueling forty day marathon that is Gods Will Be Watching, but never further. In the end, I feel like that says something more about me than it should: I […]
Super Absurd Japanese Name: Shin Megami Tensei IV
The thing that’s kept me coming back to Shin Megami Tensei over the years has been its most Sci-Fi element: its sense of discovery. IV, the series latest entry for the 3DS, emphasizes this point; […]
The Unknown Depths of Capsule
One thing videogames are quite good at is ambiguity. An ambiguous novel is hard to pull off at best, infuriating at worst: you need to be told what’s happening in order to imagine anything, and […]
Dungeons and Dementia
Of all its many wonders, Rogue Legacy’s most enticing is that it lets you play as a archmage with dementia and color blindness who still manages to wipe the floor with an army of skeletons, […]
The Most Exciting Sci Fi and Fantasy Games of E3
(Ed. Note: some of the trailers linked to here may not be appropriate for all audiences.) Gaming junkies among you will note that E3—the biggest gaming news convention of the year—happened last week. The big […]
Shadowrun Returns
This month, we will see the first fruits of the great Kickstarter flood of 2012. The four titans of that period—Double Fine’s Broken Age, Obsidian’s Project Eternity, in Exile’s Wasteland 2, and Harebrained Schemes Shadowrun […]
Howling Dogs and Gaming on the Fringes
Mainstream video games—the kinds that have massive advertising campaigns—have codified our genres. They’ve done this much like film has. There are superhero movies and science fiction tentpoles, much like there are fantasy RPGs or space […]
The Linguistic Wonders of Fez
As a kid, I never liked Tolkien very much. I loved The Hobbit, like anyone did, but couldn’t ever obsess over Lord of the Rings. I could never get past the writing style heavy on […]
Growing Your Own Space Garden
Explaining Starseed Pilgrim, an Independent Games Festival winner about building a garden in space, is both incredibly easy and nightmarishly complex. At its heart, you float around on flying gardens, plant seeds that produce pleasant […]
The Ergodic* Nature of Games
When I was in college studying creative writing, I fell in love with a lot of writers: Haruki Murakami, Jonathan Lethem, David Mitchell, Michael Chabon, all of the genre-bending literary fiction authors. It was probably […]
Weaned on Science Fiction and Fantasy
One thing that’s been abundantly clear to me, as someone weaned on video games, is how indebted we are to science fiction and fantasy. Final Fantasy’s core concepts―its monsters, its ridiculous evil antagonists, its specific […]
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