When you think of unexplored genres that would make for interesting games, I don’t think that customs officer simulation would be one of them. Yet, Papers, Please is one of more interesting games that I’ve played in a while… Even if it does seem at time like a desk organization simulator too.
Video Games
Remember Me Review: The Memory Remains
A while back, I wrote a column lamenting the loss of new intellectual properties coming from the big publishers. One of the few new multi-platform IPs that is coming out this year is Capcom’s Remember Me. It had an interesting premise and the rare not hypersexualized female protagonist leading the game. For the first few hours, Remember Me was certainly worth my past consideration as a new IP to wake up the industry.
However, the experience doesn’t hold up over time. While there are parts of the game that are very memorable, it’s certainly not the unforgettable rookie developer Dontnod were hoping for.
Rogue Legacy Review: Everybody Rogue
With the games release schedule decidedly quiet during the summer, it’s a good time for everyone, including would-be games critics, to catch up on games that you might have missed during the first months of the year. To be quite honest, I’m not sure how many of this year’s big releases I’ve finished.
I’m starting with the current indie darling du jour, Rogue Legacy. It’s received heaps of praise from critics but what do I, a gamer of average skill and free time, think of the latest big thing on the indie game scene?
Aarklash: Legacy Preview: A Little Bit of Old School
It’s not often that we get our hands on a preview version of a game but who am I to turn down a new experience. So, naturally, when Cyanide gave me an opportunity to take an early look at their upcoming RPG Aarklash: Legacy, I jumped at the opportunity and was pleasantly surprised with what I saw.
Phil Fish vs. Marcus Beer Says More About Games Journalism than Either Man
The weekend’s big gaming news story wasn’t about a new game or another major announcement but a feud between two gaming personalities.
On one side was Marcus Beer, GameTrailer’s Annoyed Gamer, who criticized prominent indie developers Phil Fish and Jonathan Blow for not commenting on Microsoft allowing indie game self-publishing on the Xbox One. On the other side was the aforementioned Phil Fish who didn’t take kindly to Beer lobbing personal insults at him on video.
However, I don’t think that the takeaway from this feud should be anything about either Beer or Fish. I think how this feud started says more about how this gaming journalism works and why it might be irreparably broken.
Will The Xbox One Be Your Overly Attached Girlfriend? (Infographic)
Microsoft might have gotten rid of the online check-in DRM requirements for the Xbox One but doesn’t mean that it isn’t still watching you. We’ve all read that it’s built around advertising with the Kinect integral to making that advertising work better for advertisers. The Kinect always watching and Microsoft’s compliance in giving data to the NSA doesn’t make me feel better about it.
So is the Xbox One going to be like a clingy girlfriend? The folks at Kensington make that case in a handy infographic.
Unreal Engine Could Be Next-Gen’s Big Loser
What do BioShock Infinite, the Mass Effect trilogy, the XCOM series, the Batman: Arkham series, Dishonored and Spec Ops: The Line all have in common? If you read the title of this column, you probably guessed that these are all games made in the Unreal Engine.
Many of this generation’s most popular and most critically acclaimed games were made on Unreal Engine 3. While the next generation of console gaming doesn’t start for another four months, early plans don’t seem to involve Unreal Engine 4 which was the first next-gen engine that was previewed.
While we might give Nintendo a hard time over poor Wii U sales and criticize Microsoft’s former DRM policies, they might not be the big losers of the next generation. When the industry moves on to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, Unreal 4 could be the one who’s left behind.
The Walking Dead: 400 Days (PC) Review: Long on Stories, Short on Storytelling
Last year’s The Walking Dead by Telltale Games was a real surprise. Not only was it a licensed game that turned out to be spectacular when the TV show based on the comics was struggling but it came from a developer who hadn’t put out a really good game in the previous couple of years. The Walking Dead was the surprise hit of 2012 and walked away with a number of Game of the Year awards.
With the promise of The Walking Dead: Season 2 upcoming, Telltale tided us over with a new series of five short stories from their The Walking Dead universe. Fortunately, all the success hasn’t gone to their head and tiny series of snippets into The Walking Dead play out almost as well as Season 1.
Gunpoint Review: Spying Excellence
It’s not everyday that one single indie game, an indie game that’s the first effort of a former gaming journalist, causes the whole of the gaming press to pause and take notice. But that’s what we have with Gunpoint, the rookie effort of now-former PC Gamer writer Tom Francis. I say that he’s now a former PC Gamer writer because the commercial success of Gunpoint has given Francis the financial freedom to pursue game development full-time.
So could the debut effort of a man who hasn’t made a game before and put it together in off-the-shelf game making software be worthy of all the praise it received? Yes. Yes, it can.
Xbox One vs. PS4: Who’s Really Over-Delivering Value?
In an interview on Bloomberg TV last week, Microsoft President of Interactive Entertainment, Don Mattrick, said that the Xbox One was over-delivering on value. In fact, the Xbox boss went so far as to say, “We’re delivering thousands of dollars of value to people.”
The problem is that no one apart from Mattrick, Microsoft employees and the staunchest of Xbox loyalists believe this to be the case. When you look at the dollars and cents of the next generation of consoles, it’s pretty obvious that the Xbox isn’t actually over-delivering and definitely not thousands of dollars worth of over-delivery.
The Lowdown 