I’ve gushed about how much I love video pinball before. I’m also a huge fan of tower defense, and while Plants vs Zombies isn’t strictly tower defense, it’s certainly related, and I’ve racked up a ton of hours across the Steam and XBLA versions of the game. Pinball FX 2’s (and Zen Pinball 2‘s) Plants vs. Zombies table continues the recent trend of creating tables that would not be possible on a physical machine, and just like the Marvel tables, PvZ is more interesting for it. READ MORE
The side-scrolling “Metroidvania” genre has seen some tough times. Virtually abandoned by its namesakes in favor of first-person or third-person 3D iterations, it has surprisingly found a home on Xbox Live Arcade. From Shadow Complex to Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet, and now Dust: An Elysian Tail, Metroidvanias seem alive and well on the service. READ MORE
My knowledge of The Walking Dead is limited to Telltale’s episodic game series. I know that it also exists as a comic book series and television series, but I have no idea whether the three share anything more than the basic premise that the dead are walking among the living and neither side really wants to hang out with the other. Telltale has done such a fantastic job on the games, however, that I desperately want to read the comic and catch up on the television show. I can only hope that the other media manage to create such strong ties to characters. READ MORE
The Way of the Samurai series has been around since 2002. While it hasn’t garnered the most favorable of reviews throughout its lifetime, it keep getting released year after year for the niche crowd that seems to like this series and its sometimes-bizarre nature. Do the problems that plagued the previous versions continue to prevent the series from advancing? More or less, I suppose.
The indie scene abounds with platformers, horror themes and the video game equivalent of album names in music: cryptic and asking for a deeper meaning. The latest, They Bleed Pixels, has an innovative performance-based save system that turns this platformer into an entertaining and effective mix of brawling, platforming and scoring. Most platformers have times and points, but in They Bleed Pixels, you are encouraged to kill everything, and to do so with style and combo points. Sometimes you can just kick a monster off a ledge. Or you could throw it up in the air multiple times in an air juggle, then pummel it, and then make sure that it lands on the spikes instead of the ground. READ MORE
