There’s a lot to love about Ratchet & Clank games: they’re light-hearted, they’re challenging, they gracefully merged platformer gameplay with RPG leveling mechanics and, most importantly, the developers aren’t afraid to try new things. If it weren’t for this desire to iterate and improve, we wouldn’t have weapons that level up, time-bending puzzles, giant Clank segments or the off-the-wall weapon variety that the series is known for. READ MORE
This column’s usually dedicated to gathering with your game friends and playing together. Over the holiday season, though, you’ll be just as likely (if not more so) to find yourself with assorted relatives and family friends, many of which probably aren’t up to a Borderlands session or Awesomenauts match. You don’t have to give up on these people, or even relegate yourself to trivia and music games. (Though those can be very good.) Here are some suggestions for “gateway” party-friendly titles, that just may get people enjoying (or at least understanding) the hobby you love. READ MORE
To save myself a ton of time, I wanted to start this by stating that just about everything Andrew mentioned in his review of Trine 2 still applies to the Wii U edition. This game looks just as amazing and plays just as brilliantly as it does on other systems, and all of the puzzling adventures contained there are here as well. But that isn’t all, as Director’s Cut includes much more. READ MORE
Snackbar Games Podcast
Hosts: Mike Carabajal and Marco Ortega (2005-2009), Andrew Passafiume (2011-2012), Graham Russell (2011-2012), Shawn Vermette (2011-2012), Henry Skey (2012)
Games chat with a rotating cast of characters from the Snackbar crew.
For the tenth anniversary, we chat with founders Chris Rasco and Mike Carabajal about the early days and hear tales of Snackbar past. Want to know why we’re named Snackbar Games, why we have a hyphen in our URL or just how much the site has changed in ten years? This is the episode that will provide those answers. Mostly.
Check out the show here, check us out on iTunes or use the RSS feed in your favorite podcast aggregator. Let us know what you think! Email podcast[at]snackbar-games.com.
Hosts: Andrew Passafiume, Graham Russell, Shawn Vermette.
Guests: Mike Carabajal, Chris Rasco.
Music: Podcast theme by Tom Casper.
In If We Ran, we look at what we’d do if given control over game companies to get them going in a positive direction. In this anniversary edition, we take on Capcom, arguably the most controversial publisher in the industry right now. It has some big issues it needs to fix, and these are six steps we think it should take to do so. It’s already taken one on their own this month, when it announced a free (fan-made) PC game to celebrate Mega Man‘s 25th anniversary: Street Fighter X Mega Man. READ MORE
