The Backlog: Unreal

It turns out that the people who make Gears of War also make some other game series called Unreal.  Or at least they used to.  You wouldn’t really know it, considering that it has been five years since they actually released an Unreal game.  Killing locusts with chainsaw bayonets is all well and good, but now that the Gears trilogy is done, maybe Epic Games can get back to the franchise that put them on the map in the first place.  Last week Epic Games publicly unveiled the existence of the Unreal Engine 4.  This isn’t an actual game, it’s just the new engine they’re working on.  It has been Epic’s custom to show off their latest engine with a new Unreal game, so perhaps shooter fans can look forward to Unreal Tournament 4, or even an actual story-based shooter set in the Unreal universe at some point in the next couple of years.  Continue Reading

Kingdoms of Amalur: One Game Can’t Save The Economy

Mainstream media is fond of pointing out that the video game industry pulls in more money than the movie industry. This factoid is true, but most of that money goes to game publishers based on the West Coast. There are some major game publishers and developers on the East Coast too, including Rockstar in New York and Bethesda in Maryland, and it’s easy to see how other state governments would be eager to get a piece of this lucrative pie.  That’s why Rhode Island was so keen to offer a 75 million-dollar loan to a new game developer called 38 Studios for their very first game, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. Today, only three months after thelaunch ofthat title, the studio has folded, leaving Rhode Island inan embarrassing predicament.  Continue Reading

House of Ghostly Haunts – Review

House of Ghostly Haunts is not a haunted house, it’s a magic show that features the occasional appearance of visitors from beyond the veil.  In the show, Cardone The Magician conjures a smorgasbord of vaudeville performance styles including mentalism, ventriloquism, escape artistry and even summons some spirits using techniques that would surely have convinced our Victorian ancestors that he is in contact with the afterlife.  Continue Reading

Max Payne 3 – Review

Max Payne is simultaneously a super-human killing machine, and an underdog.  He can do amazing things like slow down time, dive headfirst down a flight of stairs unscathed, and shoot two Uzis at the same time, but he’s still always about to die.  For just about every level in Max Payne 3, Max is either drunk, hung over, or hopped up on goofballs to the point that he’s seeing double.  Plus he’s constantly surrounded by heavily armed goons, and any time he gets the upper hand, his luck turns sour.  Max is one sorry bastard who just can’t seem to catch a break. Continue Reading

The Backlog: Defense of the Ancients & League of Legends

Having a stack of old games that have gone un-played for years isn’t so much of a problem with single-player games.  Those stories are waiting to be heard, and those dusty old disks are happy to sit on the shelf until someone finds the time to play them.  This isn’t the case with online games.  Wait too long to play a moderately successful online multiplayer game it could turn into a ghost town with only one or two lonely, desperate players logging on to see if anyone wants to play.  With extremely popular games, the online community grows smaller but more intense as casual players lose interest, leaving behind only hardcore fans who have been playing obsessively for years.   Continue Reading

Die: Roll To Proceed – Review

Long ago, before every household had one of these new-fangled computers, we still had ways to embark on interactive adventures.  “Books” we called them!  But there was a very special kind of book that added an interactive element to reading, they were called “Choose Your Own Adventure”.  From science-fiction epics like Third Planet From Altair to swords & sorcery sagas like Pillars of Pentagarn these books ended each chapter with a choice for the Reader.  Based on what the Reader wanted to happen next, they would be told to skip ahead to a particular page where the adventure continued, and their choices would cause the story to play out differently, sometimes with a happy ending, other times with a quick death for the main character.  They’re a delightful piece of nostalgia for many nerds and are still being printed today.  Proof that this sort of story-telling isn’t going away is an interactive play running off-off Broadway called Die: Roll to proceed.  Continue Reading

Explore the Heart of Darkness In Spec Ops: The Line

It took me a while to see where the developers of this game were going.  The brooding narrator, the war-torn third-world nation, a paranoid journalist, the natives acting oddly…  Eventually I realized that I had misjudged Spec Ops: The Line.  This was no generic “Army guys who shoot the Arabs” game.  I was playing through Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the book that inspired Apocalypse Now!  Continue Reading