When I was a kid, my dad would take my brother and me on fishing trips. We weren’t the most outdoors-y people, so we always threw our fish back (if we caught any at all) and got lunch from a local restaurant. It was in these swaths of time that my dad taught me about pinball. It didn’t matter that your grilled cheese had arrived when you were about to earn an extra ball on the Demolition Man table. READ MORE
As a kid, I loved trading card games such as Konami’s Yu-Gi-Oh! or Nintendo’s Pokémon, playing matches with other kids at school, trading on the playground and arguing over the best cards and strategies. One game that I never got into was Magic: The Gathering, a trading card game targeted toward an older audience, sporting high-fantasy card art designs and more mature themes. I went into Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013 as an absolute newcomer, knowing absolutely nothing about its rules, cards or workings. In the end, I am glad I did, as it allowed me answer two questions: does it serve as an adequate introduction to the trading card game for new players, and is the game good enough to stand on its own without relying on its source material?
It is every designer’s dream to create a breakout hit, and Kim Swift did exactly that with Portal. Then, in a move that shocked everybody, she left Valve to make games with friends and ex-FASA (Crimson Alliance, Shadowrun) employees. From that odd move, Quantum Conundrum was born, and it’s really difficult not to compare it to Swift’s first retail game since the two are so very similar. READ MORE
I am coming into this game biased. I’m a big Penny Arcade fan, I’m a big SNES-era RPG fan, and combining those two things is an easy match for me to get behind. Episodes 1 and 2 surprised me with how much fun I could have in combat that focused a lot on consumable items. Being a fan of old RPGs, I had to unlearn my hoarding. If that bottle of weaksauce would make things easier right now then I needed to use it. There’s another bottle around the corner anyhow. READ MORE
With a name like Bang Bang Racing, right out of the box (well, download in this case), you’d likely be expecting something along the lines of a Twisted Metal-style racing with guns and such, or even something like Mario Kart where you shoot items at one another trying to over take one another in an extreme struggle to stay in first. Instead, it’s a Micro Machines-like racing game that doesn’t use any of those items at all. While that may be a surprise, it doesn’t make it any less of a decent game. READ MORE
