Super Meat Boy established in quality what some games before it started quite shyly. As a nail-biting hardcore platformer, it was easily (get it?) one of the most demanding but ultimately rewarding downloads you could plunk your cash into in 2010. Fenix Rage is pretty much – Green Lava Studios admitted so – inspired by…
In a world of spies and nuclear armed nations gone crazy, it’s a spy’s job to stop catastrophe. In CounterSpy, you’re put right in the middle of an arms race between two world superpowers that want to destroy the moon. It might sound like a dumb conceit for a conflict, but it makes for an…
There’s nothing quite like the feeling of landing a particularly intricate combo at just the right time in a Street Fighter IV match. The further advancements the series makes to the core formula, the more complex fights get and the better the player you are, the deeper you get into the ins and outs of…
When we think about videogame conferences, E3 and the Penny Arcade Expo are usually what comes to mind. Massive booths with loud music and multi-colored lights, huge convention centers packed to the brim with near unnavigable throngs of people, and all the games you could ever want, both big and small, vying for your attention….
Adventure games have been around for quite a while. The golden decade of the 1990s saw some of the best games ever to come out in that genre, some of which fans still talk about to this day with reverence and awe. One of such games is 1993’s Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, which…
For as much as I like roguelike games – you know, the ones that have you traverse randomly generated levels and that punish you severely if you happen to die by sending you all the way back to the beginning – they’re extremely hard to get right. That’s even more evident when it comes to…
“Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me.” The first line from a lyrical poem written by Emily Dickinson may sum up the final battle from the recently released Reaper of Souls expansion, far more elegantly and with outstanding accuracy, given that it was first published in 1890. In truth, Diablo III’s journey…
Styx: Master of Shadows, from Cyanide Studio, feels at odds with itself. It’s a stealth game that tries to court two different schools of stealth design: the modern open-ended approach and the classic rigidness of trial and error. For a while, it strikes a fine balance between the two, giving you plenty of room to…
Like a good mystery novel, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter drops you in deep from the very beginning. You fill in the shoes of supernatural detective Paul Prospero, who’s apparently hot on the trail of a missing kid, the titular Ethan Carter. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter shares some of the same characteristics that highlighted…
With a wide array of memorable music, adorable characters, and easy to pick up and play gameplay, Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call strikes the perfect chord between accessibility and challenge in a genre where complexity and uneven difficulty too often dictate the tempo. “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They…
