The Backlog: Psychonauts

The game industry was alight this week with talk of Tim Schafer’s lightning-quick fundraising campaign on Kickstarter, a website that helps artists fund their projects by getting large groups of people to make small donations.  Raising over a million dollars in a day, Schafer broke records and made indie game developers take notice.  Even Notch from Minecraft has been tweeting about making a sequel to Shafer’s 2005Psychonauts.  This Schafer guy sure must make some fine games to get such an outpouring of support from fans and other game makers!  It is with much shame I must confess that I never played one of his games.  It turns out that I actually own a bunch of his games, which include classics like Escape From Monkey Island, and Day of the Tentacle.  Continue Reading

Hands-On With Yesterday

Adventure Games have a tough time in the modern market.  With their emphasis on story-telling, intellectual challenge and tried & true mechanics, the genre is a hard sell for audiences that continually seek better graphics, online multiplayer and “The same, but MORE” gameplay.  Still, there are several prominent developers who specialize in this genre, among them is Pendulo Studios .  With series like Runaway, and last year’s The Next BIG Thing to their credits, they are known for light-hearted projects, but their upcoming game Yesterday is taking the series in a new direction.  A creepy direction.  Player Affinity got the chance to try out a few chapters of the new project and explored the beginning of this dark storyline.  Continue Reading

Dragon Age Redemption DVD – Review

“Felicia Day in Dragon Age blah blah blah blah”.  That’s what many people will see when they look at the cover of this DVD.  The cute redhead from The Guild?  In a live-action Dragon Agemovie?  That’s enough to sell this DVD to plenty of consumers.  But what about all the other people who might enjoy this compilation of the swords & sorcery webseries?  Is there enough justification on the disk to warrant the purchase of something that can be seen on the internet for free?  Continue Reading

Metal Gear Solid Snake Eater 3D: Hands-on

I bought Metal Gear Solid 3 Snake Eater the day it came out back in 2004.  After enjoying my first playthrough, it sat on my game shelf for eight years awaiting the day it would make its way back into my PS2 for another run.  It took the release of the game on 3DS to get me to try it again, and now that a playable demo has hit the 3DS eShop I sat down with both versions of the game to see how it handled the transition from cutting edge console game to 3DS portable title.  Continue Reading

Three Dead Zed – Review

If a zombie is great, then surely THREE zombies are even better! That’s the thinking behind the action platformer Three Dead Zed by Gentleman Squid. Players control a zombie who has the power to transform between three different bodies at will.  While this might seem like a cool set of super-powers, this undead beast is actually the misshapen victim of a fiendish experiment and players must use the various powers of the three forms to escape from the people responsible. Continue Reading

Will Mass Effect 3’s “Action Mode” Ruin The Game?

The first chance at some hands on with Mass Effect 3 hit the internet this week as the single-player demo became available.  The many fans of this franchise can finally try the new mechanics, experience the continuation of the epic story and ogle the new graphics.  There are also many smaller tweaks to the Mass Effect experience added in this third installment of the franchise.  Among them is a new gameplay pre-set system that allows players to tailor the experience to resemble their preferred gaming genre.  This system offers three “Modes”, Action, RPG or the classic Mass Effect hybrid of action and roleplay.  Unfortunately, players who choose the “Action” option are playing the game wrong.  Continue Reading

Spirits – Review

Back in 1991, the game Lemmings created a whole new genre of puzzle game. Players were given the chore of shepherding a group of suicidal critters through levels crammed with all sorts of hazards. Unable to directly control the movements of these helpless morons, players did have the power to affect how the lemmings interacted with their environment. By instructing them to do the right thing at the right moment, the doomed creatures would (mostly) arrive safely at their destination. Spirits by Spaces of Play has players using a streamlined form of the same gameplay to help disembodied spirits reach their goal in the afterlife. Perhaps this is the video game community’s chance to atone for all those lemmings they killed back in the 90s?  Continue Reading